27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Study-level data from 14 studies, 2,310,330 individuals, and 102,174 dementia case patients were included. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,310,330 Evidence: high
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Modifiable vascular and lifestyle-related risk factors have been associated with dementia risk in observational studies. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 631 Evidence: high
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We identified rare coding variants associated with Alzheimer's disease in a three-stage case-control study of 85,133 subjects. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 85,133 Evidence: moderate
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In analyses that addressed bias due to reverse causation, physical inactivity was not associated with all-cause dementia or Alzheimer's disease, although an indication of excess dementia risk was observed in a subgroup of physically inactive individuals who developed cardiometabolic disease. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 404 Evidence: high
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The APOE ε4 carriers and noncarriers were not significantly different at baseline (except for serum cholesterol level). 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,260 Evidence: high
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The FINGER intervention was beneficial regardless of participants' characteristics and can thus be implemented in a large elderly population at increased risk for dementia. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,260 Evidence: high
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This study is based on 2 cross-sectional surveys of people aged 75 years or over conducted in central Stockholm: the Kungsholmen Project (KP) (1987-1989, n = 1,700) and the Swedish National study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K) (2001-2004, n = 1,575). 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,700 Evidence: low
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Supported by very low-to-moderate certainty of evidence, physical activity/exercise has a positive effect on several cognitive and noncognitive outcomes in people with MCI and dementia, but RCTs, with low risk of bias/confounding, are still needed to confirm these relationships. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 28,205 Evidence: high
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The association between BMI and dementia is likely to be attributable to two different processes: a harmful effect of higher BMI, which is observable in long follow-up, and a reverse-causation effect that makes a higher BMI to appear protective when the follow-up is short. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,894 Evidence: moderate
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The number of years of formal education completed by individuals is positively correlated with their cognitive function throughout adulthood and predicts lower risk of dementia late in life. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
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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
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The modern era of drug development for Alzheimer's disease began with the proposal of the cholinergic hypothesis of memory impairment and the 1984 research criteria for Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
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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
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At baseline, 2,279 dementia-free participants with available blood samples were included (median age 72 (interquartile range, 61-81) years; 62% female). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 2,279 Evidence: moderate
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In this genetic association study, a novel variant associated with AD was identified: R251G always coinherited with ε4 on the APOE gene, which mitigates the ε4-associated AD risk. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 37 Evidence: moderate
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The relationship between serum total cholesterol (TC) and dementia seems to be bidirectional. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,449 Evidence: moderate
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The construct of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has evolved over the past 10 years since the publication of the new MCI definition at the Key Symposium in 2003, but the core criteria have remained unchanged. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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The 52 baseline participants comprised autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease mutation carriers (n = 11; 49.6 ± 10.3 years old) and non-carriers (n = 16; 51.1 ± 14.2 years old; 10 male), and patients with sporadic mild cognitive impairment (n = 17; 61.9 ± 6.4 years old; nine male) and sporadic Alzheimer's disease (n = 8; 63.0 ± 6.5 years old; five male); for confidentiality reasons, the gender of mutation carriers is not revealed. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Researchers conducted a large, two-stage meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in individuals of European ancestry.
Evidence: low
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Evidence regarding the clinical validity of blood biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the general population is limited. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
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Slow gait speed has been shown to predict incident dementia and cognitive decline in older individuals. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 57,456 Evidence: moderate
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The mean age was 70.9 years (standard deviation, 5.9), 57.2% were women, 40.6% were illiterate, and 88.3% were farmers. 2 key findings →
Participants: 5,765 Evidence: high
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A total of 3363 adults were enrolled in SNAC-K (73.3% participation rate). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,363 Evidence: moderate
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The influence of mixed dietary patterns on cognitive changes is unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,223 Evidence: moderate
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Obesity has been consistently associated with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,304 Evidence: moderate
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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 27,780 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.
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 →