A total of 20 studies were included in the systematic review, and 17 provided data for the meta-analysis. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 20 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
A total of 267 (3.8%) women had diabetes and 297 (4.2%) had IFG. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 267 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Central obesity in midlife increases risk of dementia independent of diabetes and cardiovascular comorbidities. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,049 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
71/100
Both overweight and obesity at midlife independently increase the risk of dementia, AD, and VaD. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 350 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our findings support the hypothesis that depression is a risk factor for dementia and suggest that recurrent depression is particularly pernicious. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,239 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Elevated blood pressure during midlife, persistence of elevated blood pressure into late life, and, among nonhypertensives, a steep decline in blood pressure during mid- to late life were associated with an increased dementia risk in a community-based cohort. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,440 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Smoking, head injury, pesticide exposure, and farming are potential risk factors for idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Participants: 694 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
At baseline, DSI was significantly associated with increased dementia prevalence compared to normal sensory function (odds ratio [OR] 2.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.17-4.02), but SSI was not (OR 1.27, 95% CI 0.66-2.41). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
= 0.009). Significant differences in annualized changes in these FA and MD values were found depending on the presence or absence of type 2 diabetes and smoking. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,471 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Of 733 participants (mean age 82.5 ± 2.9 years), 164 (22.4%) developed MCI and 93 (12.7%) developed dementia by the follow-up visit. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 321 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Short-term mortality is increased in patients newly diagnosed with probable AD. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 327 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
To review the evidence for risk factors of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), we pooled and reanalyzed the raw data of three case-control studies. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 178 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our results support an association between anemia experienced early in life and the later development of Parkinson disease. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 196 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Poor speech-in-noise hearing (>-5.5-dB speech reception threshold; prevalence 14%) was associated with lower cognitive scores (ß = -1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI] -1.54 to -1.03). 5 key findings →
Participants: 80,074 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
4,824 patients seen at the memory clinic between 2008-2018 were included in this study (mean age 72.7 [standard deviation 11.0] years, 2,712 [56%] female, 543 [11%] Black). 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 4,824 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We conducted a case-control study of clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease (AD) on 170 cases aged 52 to 96 years, and 170 controls matched for age, sex and, where possible, the general practice of origin. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Diabetes mellitus increases the risk of dementia, and VaD in particular, in very old people. 4 key findings →
Participants: 350 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Previous reports have suggested that estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) in women may exert a protective effect on their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This study confirmed a number of previously reported risk factors for AD, but provided little support for others. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
57/100
These cases illustrate that the alpha-synuclein pathogenic process may start decades before the first symptoms of PD, DLB, or MSA. 1 key finding →
Participants: 27 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
57/100
(n = 2,392) had a mean age of 74.4 years, 60.4% were female, and 17.1% were of self-reported Black race. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,392 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
There were 13,145 individuals with risk factor data between 2015 and 2018 (51.1% aged 18-44, 31.0% aged 45-64, and 17.9% aged ≥65 years; 51.5% female after survey-weighting). 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 13,145 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Welders were exposed to a mean of 47,144 welding hours. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
= 0.991). Optimal sleep modified both cognitive performance and dementia risk in individuals with focal epilepsy compared with stroke patients and healthy controls. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have elevations of fasting plasma insulin that are hypothesized to be associated with disrupted brain insulin metabolism. 2 key findings →
Participants: 25 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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.
1,034 records (3.7% 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 →