27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
In this large cohort, heavy smoking in midlife was associated with a greater than 100% increase in risk of dementia, AD, and VaD more than 2 decades later. 5 key findings →
Participants: 5,367 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Among 2935 patients (50.4% women; mean age=72.2 years; 19.8% subjective cognitive impairment, 39.8% mild cognitive impairment, and 40.4% dementia), larger WMH volume within projection fibres (B=0.24, SE=0.10, p=0.013) was associated with greater apathy. 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,935 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) is a leading cause of stroke and dementia with no specific treatment, of which molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. 2 key findings →
Participants: 40,000 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Diabetes was not associated with brain atrophy cross-sectionally or longitudinally. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 112 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Our aim is to examine the interplay between cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) pathology, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) related amyloid-β (Aβ) clearance, and cognition in general population. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,026 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study included 3540 participants with RVC data and 489 with WMH data (median [IQR] age: 73.2 [71.4-76.3] and 72.5 [71.2-75.4] years; female: 52.9% and 47.6%) over a median follow-up of 7.4 [IQR 5.5-8.5] and 3.8 [IQR 2.9-5.3] years, respectively. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 3,540 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Out of 462,327 eligible participants, those with constipation were associated with higher incidence of three outcome diseases (1415/20,263 [7.0%]) than those without (18,848/442,064 [4.3%]), with adjusted hazard ratio (HR) being 1.35 [1.27-1.42]. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Hypertension, acute myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, heart failure, ischemic heart disease, stroke, and arthritis additively accounted for 71.8% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 62.9%-79.1%) of ADRD incident cases based on LE-AAF. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our results confirm that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease. 5 key findings →
Participants: 171 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We used the medical records linkage system for the population of Rochester, Minnesota, to identify persons in the community who had their first cerebral infarct without previous dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 971 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The cognitive deficits in VaD and VCI are characterized by disturbance of frontal functions, with less verbal memory impairment. 2 key findings →
Participants: 170 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Metabolic syndrome is associated with Alzheimer disease in elderly subjects. 5 key findings →
Participants: 959 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Central auditory dysfunction is a precursor to AD. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Some patients receiving oral anticoagulation therapy are more challenging to maintain within the therapeutic range than others. 2 key findings →
Participants: 124,619 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Our results suggest that genes associated with clinical neurological disease also have detectable effects on subclinical phenotypes. 5 key findings →
Participants: 705 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Increased SBP and low milk intake in midlife were associated with VaD detected 25 to 30 years later. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We found that 451 (92.8%) of the patients were testable, 239 (49.2%) of the patients were women, and the mean age was 71.2 years. 5 key findings →
Participants: 486 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
TBI is an independent significant risk factor of developing dementia even in the mild type. 3 key findings →
Participants: 28,551 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The aging population is increasing and, therefore, a higher prevalence of cardiac disease is emerging; including hypertension, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation and chronic heart failure. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
These cross-sectional results suggest that cortical changes (regional-specific damage and network breakdown), mediated (in)directly by WMH (tract-specific damage) and other factors (eg, vascular risk factors), might lead to cognitive decline. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 426 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Log-rank testing, adjusted for matching, showed a highly significant difference in stroke-free survival between the two groups (p<0.0001). 4 key findings →
Participants: 4,709 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A total of 124 participants with Alzheimer disease, cerebrovascular disease, or a mix Alzheimer's and cerebrovascular diseases and 55 controlparticipants underwent magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological testing. 5 key findings →
Participants: 124 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by senile plaques and neurodegeneration although the neurotoxic mechanisms have not been completely elucidated. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
White matter hyperintensity (WMH), indicative of cerebral small vessel disease, has emerged as a potential biomarker for cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 158 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Considerable data support the presence of both systemic and CNS inflammation in SVD and VCID. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study 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 →