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.

Head injury and 25-year risk of dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association 2021-03-09

Head injury was associated with risk of dementia (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.44, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3-1.57), with evidence of dose-response (1 head injury: HR = 1.25, 95% CI = 1.13-1.39, 2+ head injuries: HR = 2.14, 95% CI = 1.86-2.46). 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 14,376 Evidence: moderate

Midlife Vascular Risk Factors, Parkinson Disease, and Parkinson Disease-Dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. Neurology 2025-09-04

Among 13,875 individuals with nonmissing VRF and outcome data with up to 30 years of follow-up (25% Black, 54% female), 179 developed PD at a mean age of 73.4 years, 94 developed PDD at a mean age of 79.2 years, and 1,791 developed dementia without PD at a mean age of 79.7 years. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 13,875 Evidence: moderate

Educational Attainment and Dementia: Mediation by Mid-Life Vascular Risk Factors

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. Annals of Neurology 2023-04-27

A substantial proportion of the relationship between education and dementia was mediated through mid-life vascular risk factors. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 13,368 Evidence: moderate

Stroke, dementia, and hypertension are associated with late-onset epilepsy; however, the role of other vascular and lifestyle factors remains unclear. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 792 Evidence: moderate

= 0.009). Significant differences in annualized changes in these FA and MD values were found depending on the presence or absence of type 2 diabetes and smoking. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,471 Evidence: moderate

More-severe diabetes (defined by higher HbA 1c and longer disease duration) but not prediabetes or less-severe diabetes was associated with smaller brain volumes and an increased burden of brain vascular pathology. 3 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,713 Evidence: low

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

Diabetes status, poor glycemic control, and longer diabetes duration were associated with worse cognitive outcomes over a median follow-up of 5 years. 4 key findings →

Participants: 5,099 Evidence: low

Intracranial atherosclerotic disease (ICAD) is an important cause of stroke and has also been recently identified as an important risk factor for all-cause dementia, but the mechanism of its association with cognitive performance is not fully understood. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 346 Evidence: moderate

Large-scale plasma proteomic analysis identifies proteins and pathways associated with dementia risk

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 63 out of 100. Nature aging 2021-05-14

The plasma proteomic changes that precede the onset of dementia could yield insights into disease biology and highlight new biomarkers and avenues for intervention. 4 key findings →

Participants: 4,110 Evidence: moderate

Association of orthostatic hypotension with incident dementia, stroke, and cognitive decline

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 62 out of 100. Neurology 2018-07-25

We analyzed data from 11,709 participants without a history of coronary heart disease or stroke who attended the baseline examination (1987-1989) of the prospective Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. 4 key findings →

Participants: 11,709 Evidence: moderate

Our findings suggest that poor olfaction is associated with multiple AD-related and other neurodegenerative processes. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,545 Evidence: moderate

Intracranial atherosclerosis and dementia: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 59 out of 100. Neurology 2017-03-22

From 2011 to 2013, 1,744 participants completed high-resolution vessel wall MRI from the population-based Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study by a sampling strategy that allowed weighting back to the cohort. 4 key findings →

Participants: 291 Evidence: moderate

Among ACHIEVE participants in the top quartile of predicted risk, 3-year cognitive decline in the hearing intervention was 61.6% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 33.7%-94.1%) slower than the control. 5 key findings →

Participants: 2,692 Evidence: moderate

This study tested the hypotheses that late-midlife obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and short and long sleep duration are associated with dementia over 15 years of follow-up. 4 key findings →

Participants: 1,667 Evidence: low

Cardiovascular risk factors and cerebral atrophy in a middle-aged cohort

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. Neurology 2005-09-01

Because cardiovascular (CV) risk factors have been associated with declines in cognitive functions and late life dementia, CV risk factors should also be associated with brain atrophy. 4 key findings →

Participants: 1,812 Evidence: moderate

& objective Evidence is limited on how estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and urinary albumin-creatinine ratio (UACR) relate to dementia at different ages. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 9,967 Evidence: moderate

During follow-up, 203 cases of hospitalisation with dementia were identified. 5 key findings →

Participants: 151 Evidence: moderate

AF is associated with greater cognitive decline and increased risk of dementia, independent of ischemic stroke. 5 key findings →

Participants: 515 Evidence: low

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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
  • Randomized / 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
  • Multicenter 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 31,380 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 31,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.2%), 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.

1,048 records (3.3% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 973 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    Where this research is being discussed: events