Diabetes prevention and glucose control in midlife may protect against late-life cognitive decline. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
30,980 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
A combination of modifiable vascular risk factors in midlife is highly predictive of the likelihood of dementia decades later. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,767 Evidence: moderate
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Atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and angina were associated with a greater rate of decline and may represent modifiable risk factors for secondary prevention in Alzheimer disease. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 135 Evidence: moderate
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Our results suggest that having an increased body weight or abdominal obesity are associated with increased dementia incidence. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 453 Evidence: moderate
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67/100
Cox regression and accelerated failure time models were used to investigate whether sex, apolipoprotein E genotype and e4 carriage were associated with amyloid onset age in all cohorts. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Using nearly 8,000 British civil servants followed for up to 25 years (the Whitehall II study), this study found that people who slept 6 hours or less per night in their 50s and 60s had a higher later risk of dementia than those sleeping about 7 hours, even after accounting for other health and social factors. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 7,959 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This unusually long 28-year study found no evidence that being physically active in midlife protects against dementia later in life. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,308 Evidence: null result
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This 28-year study tracked depressive symptoms in over 10,000 people and found that depression appearing later in life (closer to a dementia diagnosis) was linked to higher dementia risk, but depression in midlife (decades before diagnosis) was not. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,189 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among eligible participants (n = 705,061), 264,294 individuals (37.5% of eligible participants) initiated any statin during 2001-2010 ("initiators"), of whom 249,613 (94.4%) were matched with 255,937 unique noninitiators to create the analytic sample (322,358 unique participants; mean age at baseline = 67.4 years; 55.1% female). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 322,358 Evidence: high
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In this cohort study, high adherence to a flavonoid-rich diet score was associated with a lower risk of dementia, with reductions more pronounced in individuals with a high genetic risk, hypertension, and depressive symptoms. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 121,986 Evidence: moderate
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After a median follow-up of 6.3 years, 678 individuals were diagnosed with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 84,854 Evidence: moderate
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A substantial proportion of the relationship between education and dementia was mediated through mid-life vascular risk factors. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 13,368 Evidence: moderate
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A cohort of 4 522 160 US veterans (4 243 462 [93.8%] male; median [interquartile range] age, 64.1 [55.7-75.5] years; 3 702 942 [82.0%] white, 667 550 [14.8%] black, and 145 593 [3.2%] other race) was followed up for a median (interquartile range) of 10.0 (6.8-10.2) years. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Cognitive exercise training in healthy older individuals produces strong and persistent protective effects on longitudinal neuropsychological performance. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 54 Evidence: high
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Greater understanding of the risk factors and mechanisms of incident dementia in stroke survivors is needed for prevention and management. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 355 Evidence: moderate
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We observed a complex series of relationships between social-environment variables and cognitive decline and dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,854 Evidence: moderate
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Intake of coffee alone or in combination with tea was associated with lower risk of poststroke dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 365,682 Evidence: moderate
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This is relevant as the number of old people (a) living alone and (b) suffering from dementia is expected to increase rapidly in the next decades. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 201 Evidence: moderate
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APOE ε4 carriage and older age were predictors of longitudinal Aβ accumulation within the Aβ- group but not the Aβ+ group. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 325 Evidence: moderate
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66/100
= 0.04). Replacing 1 serving per day of nuts and legumes for processed red meat was associated with a 19% lower risk of dementia (HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.75-0.86), 1.37 fewer years of cognitive aging (95% CI -2.49 to -0.25), and a 21% lower risk of SCD (RR 0.79, 95% CI 0.68-0.92). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
66/100
Early age at surgical menopause was associated with cognitive decline and AD neuropathology. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,884 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This 23-year study found a U-shaped relationship between alcohol and dementia risk: people who abstained from alcohol in midlife, as well as those who drank heavily (more than 14 units, about 14 standard drinks, per week), both had a higher risk of developing dementia than people who drank moderately. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 9,087 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among older adults with diabetes, no clear evidence was found that the incidence of dementia differed overall between patients using GLP-1RAs versus DPP4is. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 7,254 Evidence: early
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In this study, terminating metformin treatment was associated with increased dementia incidence. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 41,346 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Smoking cessation was associated with a sustained lower dementia risk and slower cognitive decline, comparable to never smokers and those without short-term risk increase. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 32,802 Evidence: moderate
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Where “Free full text” comes from
Free full text links and the Full text may need a subscription label come from Unpaywall, Europe PMC and OpenAlex records of free copies, checked 10 Oct 2026. A study with neither is unknown, not paywalled. Show only studies that are free to read
How the 0–100 score works — and why some entries are capped
This is alzhub's own score. It is not an official metric, not an impact factor, and no journal, publisher or ranking body endorses it. We built it so that a reader who is not a scientist can tell a landmark trial from a conference abstract without having to already know the difference. Every point comes from one of 20 components, all of them printed on the study itself, so you can disagree with our arithmetic rather than having to trust the total.
- Journal tier up to 10 pts
- Journal's citation record up to 4 pts
- Study design up to 12 pts
- Strength of evidence up to 5 pts
- Peer-review validation up to 10 pts
- How recent up to 5 pts
- Sample size up to 4 pts
- Effect reported up to 3 pts
- Studied in people up to 3 pts
- Randomised / blinded up to 2 pts
- Times cited up to 7 pts
- Citations per year up to 5 pts
- Impact for its field and year up to 6 pts
- Cited by studies here up to 6 pts
- Still being cited up to 4 pts
- Senior author's track record up to 4 pts
- Institution's track record up to 3 pts
- Multi-centre collaboration up to 3 pts
- Indexed in PubMed up to 2 pts
- Free to read up to 2 pts
Journals are placed in ordered tiers, never given a numeric impact factor — we could not verify current impact factors from a source we control, and an invented one would be worse than none. Tier 1 is the top-tier general journals (NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature, Science, Nature Medicine); tier 2 is the leading specialty journals; tier 3 is every other peer-reviewed journal. A separate part scores how much the journal's own papers are cited, which tells the tier-3 journals apart.
Two rules we don't bend. First, we never fill in a missing value: if a record does not state a sample size or a design, that component scores zero, and if we simply have no data for a part, such as a citation count, that part is left out and the study is scored on the parts we could check. The study card says which. Second, anything that is not a peer-reviewed article is capped at 16/100 and carries a warning chip — so a conference abstract or a company press release can never outrank a peer-reviewed paper, no matter how good it looks.
We rank a rigorous null result — a good trial showing that something does not work — above an early positive finding. Someone deciding whether to buy a supplement is served by that, and the rigour is already counted by the design and journal components.
The score is computed from the published data alone and is reproducible: the same file always yields the same numbers.
See the whole rubric drawn out → — four charts covering all 30,980 studies: how the scores are spread and where the cap bites, which of the 20 components the library is strong and weak on, which subjects rest on stronger evidence, and what kinds of study each subject is actually built from.
What this library is — and isn't
This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 30,980 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.2% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.4%), plus smaller pulls from PubMed, Crossref and medRxiv. If a study, a drug, or a finding isn't here, that is not evidence it doesn't exist in the literature — it may simply not have been pulled in yet.
1,042 records (3.4% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 967 of those are preprints posted before any journal review, and the rest are conference abstracts, regulatory notices and reports. Every study card on this page states its status plainly, and the score above is capped for anything that isn't a peer-reviewed article.
See the full, machine-readable breakdown of this library's coverage →
Newest studies, as a dated timeline → Atom feed Where this research is being discussed: events