27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Adult vaccinations, particularly against herpes zoster, influenza, pneumococcus and Tdap, are associated with a lower risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 104,031,186 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
PM 2.5 might be a risk factor for dementia, as well as nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxide, although with more limited data. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found no significant association for exposure to nitrogen oxides (five studies, n=241 409, pooled adjusted HR per 10 μg/m 3 increase, 1·05 [0·97-1·13]; I 2 =44%), PM 10 (four studies, n=246 440, pooled adjusted HR per 15 μg/m 3 increase, 1·52 [0·80-2·87]; I 2 =82%), or annual ozone (four studies, n=419 972, pooled adjusted HR per 45 μg/m 3 increase, 0·82 [0·35-1·92]; I 2 =69%), with moderate to considerable heterogeneity between studies in these pooled analyses. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 24,030,527 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Over a median follow-up of 10·0 years (IQR 5·1-21·3), high physical activity levels were associated with reduced risks of all-cause dementia (n=146 effect sizes; RR 0·80 [95% CI 0·75-0·86]; I 2 =97·4%), Alzheimer's disease (n=59; 0·79 [0·70-0·90]; I 2 =91·3%), and vascular dementia (n=21; 0·71 [0·58-0·87]; I 2 =77·5%); however, associations varied by domain. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,227,297 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Fragmented investigation has masked the overall picture for causes of cardiovascular disease (CVD). 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among participants in the Framingham Heart Study, the incidence of dementia has declined over the course of three decades. 3 key findings →
Participants: 5,205 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
A rapidly growing literature strongly suggests that exercise, specifically aerobic exercise, may attenuate cognitive impairment and reduce dementia risk. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) is the most effective treatment for vasomotor symptoms and other symptoms of the climacteric. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet was associated with slower MMSE cognitive decline but not consistently with other cognitive tests. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 99 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The management of symptomatic orthostatic hypotension, autonomic symptoms and depression, and the encouragement of physical activity may provide the core elements for the most fruitful strategy to reduce falls in people with dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 179 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Studies varied widely in size and quality and therefore we must be circumspect in our conclusions. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 60 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The mean (SD) age was 73.7 (6.0) years, and the mean (SD) follow-up time was 3.7 (1.2) years. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 223 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our results suggest that adherence to the MeDi is associated with better cognitive performance and lower dementia rates in Greek elders. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,865 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Personality is associated with cognitive decline in older adults, with effects comparable to established clinical and lifestyle risk factors. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 13,987 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Classification of evidence This study provides Class II evidence that specific dual-task training improves dual-task performance during walking under complex S3 conditions in geriatric patients with mild to moderate dementia. 3 key findings →
Evidence: high
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Lifestyle for Brain Health (LIBRA) may help in identifying and monitoring risk status in dementia-prevention programmes, by targeting modifiable, lifestyle-related risk factors. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 949 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
However, some individuals have subtle symptoms associated with acute MRI lesions. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 21 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Ageing of the population, together with population growth, has brought along an ample increase in the number of older individuals living with dementia and disabilities. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
It is associated with increases in mortality, physical morbidity, length of hospital stay, institutionalisation and costs to healthcare providers. 4 key findings →
Participants: 833 Evidence: high
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We conclude that there is evidence supporting the hypothesis that physical activity is likely to prevent the development of VaD, and should be highlighted as part of secondary prevention programmes in people at risk for cerebrovascular disease. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,378 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
MPF (%WC, −2.06 (95% confidence interval (CI), −2.99, −1.13) and UPF (%WC, −1.05 (95% CI, −1.98, −0.13)) resulted in weight loss, with significantly greater %WC on MPF (Δ%WC, −1.01 (95% CI, −1.87, −0.14), P = 0.024; Cohen’s d , −0.48 (95% CI, −0.91, −0.06)). 2 key findings →
Participants: 55 Evidence: high
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This observational study analyzed electronic health records of about 1.09 million US patients with type 2 diabetes and found that those prescribed semaglutide (a GLP-1 diabetes/weight-loss drug) were substantially less likely to receive a first-time Alzheimer's diagnosis over 3 years than those on other diabetes medications. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,090,000 Evidence: preliminary
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Tracking over 10,000 people for 27 years, this landmark study found that being obese in midlife (in your 40s) nearly doubled the risk of developing dementia decades later, and being overweight also raised the risk, independent of whether someone later developed diabetes or heart disease. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,276 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
In a study of nearly 190,000 older US military veterans, those who had experienced a traumatic brain injury were about 57% more likely to develop dementia over the next 9 years than veterans without a brain injury history. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 188,764 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
These findings provide evidence for a relationship between all types of alcohol use and increased dementia risk. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 559,559 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 →