Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Treatment with ChEIs results in a modest but significant therapeutic effect and modestly but significantly higher rates of adverse events and discontinuation of treatment. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 5,159 Evidence: high

Exercise training increases fitness, physical function, cognitive function, and positive behavior in people with dementia and related cognitive impairments. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,020 Evidence: high

There is very limited evidence that exercise improves cognitive function in individuals with MCI, although published research is of moderate quality and inconclusive due to low statistical power. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,695 Evidence: high

This meta-analysis pooled 14 studies of the Mini-Cog, a 3-minute memory-and-clock-drawing test doctors can give in a routine visit, to see how well it catches dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 7,194 Evidence: moderate

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

For music-based therapeutic interventions compared to usual care, we found moderate-certainty evidence that, at the end of treatment, music-based therapeutic interventions probably improved depressive symptoms slightly (standardised mean difference (SMD) -0.23, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.42 to -0.04; 9 studies, 441 participants), and we found low-certainty evidence that it may have improved overall behavioural problems (SMD -0.31, 95% CI -0.60 to -0.02; 10 studies, 385 participants). 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,720 Evidence: moderate

Time to nursing home admission and death in people with dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. BMJ 2025-01-08

The average life expectancy of people with dementia at time of diagnosis ranged from 5.7 years at age 65 to 2.2 at age 85 in men and from 8.0 to 4.5, respectively, in women. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 5,553,960 Evidence: high

The panel cautions users of this guideline that there is significant variability in diagnostic test accuracy and many commercially available BBM tests do not meet these thresholds, especially using a single cutoff. 1 key finding →

Design: systematic-review Evidence: high

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

We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and nonrandomized controlled studies at lower risk of bias comparing ChEI treatment with placebo or usual treatment, for 6 months or longer, in patients with dementia of any type. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 79,153 Evidence: high

This systematic review and meta-analyses covering a wide range of observational studies and diverse settings provides robust support for the CR hypothesis. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 437,477 Evidence: high

Topic The magnitude and direction of the association between vision impairment and incident dementia and cognitive impairment in prospective cohort studies was estimated by systematic review and meta-analysis. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 827 Evidence: high

Five RCTs of the Mediterranean diet and cognition have been published to date. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,888 Evidence: high

White matter hyperintensities are frequent on neuroimaging of older people and are a key feature of cerebral small vessel disease. 1 key finding →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,006 Evidence: high

Low SES substantially increased the risk of dementia and cognitive dysfunction, suggesting that public health strategies could reduce the dementia burden by reducing social inequalities. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,485,702 Evidence: high

The relationships between alcohol consumption and dementia and cognitive decline were investigated in a systematic review including meta-analyses of 15 prospective studies. 4 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 14,646 Evidence: high

It has been suggested that various different vitamin and mineral supplements might be useful in maintaining cognitive function and delaying the onset of dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 516 Evidence: high

Cohort studies have reported that midlife high total serum cholesterol (TC) is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in late-life but findings have been based on few studies and previous reviews have been limited by a lack of compatible data. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 23,338 Evidence: high

Midlife and late-life risk factors contributed to 22.7% and 16.5% of total dementia cases, respectively. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 37,931 Evidence: high

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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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed