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.

Risk for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD), the most prevalent dementia, is partially driven by genetics. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 94,437 Evidence: high

The incidence rate of dementia in Europe and North America has declined by 13% per decade over the past 25 years, consistently across studies. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 49,202 Evidence: moderate

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

Global Prevalence of Young-Onset Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2021-09-01

A total of 95 unique studies were included in this systematic review, of which 74 with 2 760 379 unique patients were also included in 5-year age band meta-analyses. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 95 Evidence: high

Genome-wide association studies of cerebral white matter lesion burden: the CHARGE consortium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2011-06-01

This large GWAS of WMH burden in community-based cohorts of individuals of European descent identifies a novel locus on chromosome 17. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,024 Evidence: high

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration with neuronal inclusions of the TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (FTLD-TDP) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder with only a limited number of risk loci identified. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 985 Evidence: high

Over a long period of observation, no evidence was found that a specific AHM drug class was more effective than others in lowering risk of dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 31 Evidence: high

We tested the hypothesis that plasma neurofilament light chain (NfL) identifies asymptomatic carriers of familial frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD)-causing mutations at risk of disease progression. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 277 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

Genome-wide meta-analysis for Alzheimer's disease cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. Acta neuropathologica 2022-09-06

Amyloid-beta 42 (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) reflect core features of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) more directly than clinical diagnosis. 2 key findings →

Participants: 8,074 Evidence: low

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

We conducted a meta-analysis of the conflicting epidemiologic evidence on the association between midlife body mass index (BMI) and dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 19 Evidence: high

For all 4 phosphorylation sites assessed in CSF, p-tau was significantly more closely associated with amyloid-PET values than tau-PET values (p-tau181 difference, 13%; 95% CI, 3%-22%; P = .006; p-tau217 difference, 11%; 95% CI, 3%-20%; P = .003; p-tau231 difference, 15%; 95% CI, 5%-22%; P Conclusions and relevance Results of this cross-sectional study of 2 observational cohorts suggest that the p-tau abnormality as an early event in AD pathogenesis was associated with amyloid-β accumulation and highlights the need for careful interpretation of p-tau biomarkers in the context of the amyloid/tau/neurodegeneration, or A/T/(N), framework. 2 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 609 Evidence: moderate

Common Genetic Variation Indicates Separate Causes for Periventricular and Deep White Matter Hyperintensities

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Stroke 2020-06-10

Periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH; PVWMH) and deep WMH (DWMH) are regional classifications of WMH and reflect proposed differences in cause. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,654 Evidence: high

The APOE-ε4 allele has long been associated with increased risks of Alzheimer's disease and mortality, but the effect of the less prevalent APOE-ε2 allele on diseases in the elderly and survival remains elusive. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 38,537 Evidence: moderate

Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Nature communications 2020-12-08

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. 1 key finding →

Evidence: moderate

Alzheimer's disease is one of the most heritable diseases in elderly people and the most common type of dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 926 Evidence: moderate

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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 27,380 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.

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 27,380 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed