This study found that long-term exposure to air pollution was associated with a higher risk of dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,590 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
After multivariable adjustment, patients showed an odds ratio (OR) of 1·61 (95% CI 0·80-3·25) for scale 4 versus scale 3 and 4·60 (1·85-11·48) for scale 5-6 versus scale 3 for diffusion impairment; OR 0·88 (0·66-1·17) for scale 4 versus scale 3 and OR 1·76 (1·05-2·96) for scale 5-6 versus scale 3 for anxiety or depression, and OR 0·87 (0·68-1·11) for scale 4 versus scale 3 and 2·75 (1·61-4·69) for scale 5-6 versus scale 3 for fatigue or muscle weakness. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 94 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
71/100
Statin users were less likely to have incident dementia/cognitive impairment without dementia during a 5-year follow-up. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,674 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
69/100
Hypertension after age 65 years is not associated with AD and does not adversely affect memory, language, or general cognitive function. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,259 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
69/100
Use of VR in hospitalized patients significantly reduces pain versus a control distraction condition. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 100 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
In the absence of clinical stroke, people with incident atrial fibrillation are likely to reach thresholds of cognitive impairment or dementia at earlier ages than people with no history of atrial fibrillation. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 5,150 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression is an accepted risk factor for dementia, but it is unclear if this relationship is causal. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 388 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
One hundred ninety-eight of 229 participants had WMH volumes available at both time-points. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 229 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
67/100
Among 11 601 participants (mean [SD] age, 59.18 [9.41] years; 5569 male [48.0%]), 9145 (78.8%) were exposed to at least 1 ACE indicator, 4241 (36.6%) to at least 1 AAE indicator, and 3531 (30.4%) to both ACE and AAE markers. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 601 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cognitive impairment short of dementia affects nearly one in four community-dwelling elders and is a major risk factor for later development of dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 351 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Incident AF was associated with an increased risk of dementia, independent of clinical stroke in an elderly population. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 435 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
67/100
An increasing number of cardiometabolic diseases was dose-dependently associated with the decline in cognitive function score (one disease, β=-0·15 [95% CI -0·17 to -0·13]; two diseases, β=-0·37 [-0·40 to -0·34]; three diseases, β=-0·57 [-0·64 to -0·50]), with comorbid diabetes and stroke (β=-0·23 [-0·29 to -0·17]) contributing most strongly to cardiometabolic disease-associated cognitive decline. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 147 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The prediction algorithms are a first but promising step toward providing specific prognoses to patients, families, and practitioners. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 236 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Medical record documentation reflects physician recognition of dementia, yet physicians are aware of, but have not documented, many patients with milder cognitive impairment. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 365 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Scores for periventricular hyperintensities in this sample included all possible degrees of severity, but no participant scored more than 75% of maximum for deep white-matter hyperintensities. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 698 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
66/100
Diabetes mellitus did not increase the risk of incident AD in the Framingham cohort overall; however, DM may be a risk factor for AD in the absence of other known major AD risk factors. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,210 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
MarkVCID2 enrolled 1883 individuals age 73.4 ± 7.5 years, 65.0% female, 24.2% Hispanic, and 27.1% non-Hispanic Black. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,883 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The direct visualization of retinal vessels provides a unique opportunity to study cerebral small vessel disease, because these vessels share many features. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 490 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
64/100
Atherosclerosis of the intracranial arteries is an independent and important risk factor for dementia, suggesting potentially reversible pathways unrelated to Alzheimer pathology and stroke through which vascular changes may influence dementia risk. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 200 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
64/100
Alzheimer's disease pathology (Aβ plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and cerebral amyloid angiopathy) was significantly higher in the dMCI group than the sMCI group. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 28 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Subclinical structural brain abnormalities in high-functioning older adults can increase the risk of developing physical disabilities and declining in motor performance. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,450 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We included 147,986 participants (Chinese [n = 6,034], Filipino [n = 4,649], Japanese [n = 3,099], South Asian [n = 996], non-Latino White [n = 133,208]); the mean baseline age ranged from 69 to 72 years, and the percentage of female participants ranged from 40% to 63% across groups. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,034 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
White matter hyperintensities (WMH) - - areas of increased signal appearing on T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging - - are associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk and progression in late onset and genetic forms. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among 4712 participants (59% female; mean age, 74 years), 193 ischemic strokes and 769 dementia cases were ascertained over a median follow-up of 8.3 years. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,712 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
After propensity score matching, each group consisted of 15901 patients. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 15,901 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,180 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 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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 →