27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
These results suggest that regular exercise is associated with a delay in onset of dementia and Alzheimer disease, further supporting its value for elderly persons. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,740 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
There is moderate-to-strong support that PA benefits cognitive functioning during early and late periods of the life span and in certain populations characterized by cognitive deficits. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Adherence to a Mediterranean diet may contribute to the prevention of a series of brain diseases; this may be of special value given the aging of Western societies. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The overall weighted PAF for potentially modifiable risk factors for dementia was 39·5% (95% CI 37·5-41·6) in China (n=2162 participants), 41·2% (39·1-43·4) in India (n=2004), and 55·8% (54·9-56·7) in our Latin American sample (n=12 865). 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,162 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Seventeen trials with 1067 participants met the inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,067 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among older adults at risk of cognitive decline and dementia, a structured, higher-intensity intervention had a statistically significant greater benefit on global cognition compared with an unstructured, self-guided intervention. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,056 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this study, we found that ePVS counts were not associated with cognitive dysfunction in the general population. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,575 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This Finnish randomized controlled trial was the first large study to show that a two-year program combining diet counseling, exercise, cognitive training, and monitoring of heart-health risk factors could help maintain or improve thinking skills in older adults at elevated dementia risk, compared with a control group who received only general health advice. 3 key findings →
Design: RCT Participants: 1,260 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This meta-analysis pooled data from 24 observational studies covering over half a million older adults to ask whether cataract surgery is associated with lower long-term cognitive decline compared with leaving cataracts untreated. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 558,000 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neurotropic herpesviruses may be implicated in the development of dementia 1-5 . 1 key finding →
Design: cohort Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Previous data have linked omega-3 fatty acids with risk of dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 103,651 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
MCI prevalence was 6.7% for ages 60-64, 8.4% for 65-69, 10.1% for 70-74, 14.8% for 75-79, and 25.2% for 80-84. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The present results suggest that it will be valuable to design clinical trials to investigate the effect of late-life depression prevention on risk of dementia, in particular vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 23 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study demonstrates robust evidence that complex patterns of mental activity in the early, mid- and late-life stages is associated with a significant reduction in dementia incidence. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 29,000 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Midlife vascular risk factors are associated with increased risk of dementia in black and white ARIC Study participants. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 744 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Also, we performed analyses including only trials in which an increase in the cardiovascular fitness of participants had been demonstrated. 5 key findings →
Participants: 754 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Over a long period of observation, no evidence was found that a specific AHM drug class was more effective than others in lowering risk of dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 31 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia is a significant public health challenge and may have greater incidence among older adults from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 90 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
A long-term intervention with an EVOO-rich MedDiet resulted in a better cognitive function in comparison with a control diet. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 285 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Supported by very low-to-moderate certainty of evidence, physical activity/exercise has a positive effect on several cognitive and noncognitive outcomes in people with MCI and dementia, but RCTs, with low risk of bias/confounding, are still needed to confirm these relationships. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 28,205 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This randomized trial gave hearing aids plus counseling, or only general health education, to 977 older adults with untreated hearing loss, then tracked cognition for three years. 4 key findings →
Design: RCT Participants: 977 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Pooling 29 studies and over 2 million people, this meta-analysis found that people who were more physically active, especially at moderate-to-vigorous intensity, had a notably lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, though the protective association was stronger in studies with shorter follow-up periods. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,068,519 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Despite the relatively low risk reduction associated with higher adherence to MedDiet among elderly, it should be considered that this population is the most affected. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 65,955 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Higher adherence to a MedDiet was associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic risk, underlining the importance of diet in dementia prevention interventions. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 60,298 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this cohort study of a Korean population, decreased risk of dementia was associated with maintaining mild to moderate alcohol consumption, reducing alcohol consumption from a heavy to a moderate level, and the initiation of mild alcohol consumption, suggesting that the threshold of alcohol consumption for dementia risk reduction is low. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 3,933,382 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
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.
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 27,380 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.
This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 27,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (60.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.6%), 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.
1,032 records (3.8% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 962 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 →