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.

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

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

We identified 22 hospital-based and eight population-based eligible cohorts (7511 patients) described in 73 papers. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 7,511 Evidence: high

Of 544 eligible participants (241 women and 303 men), the mean (SD) age was 74.3 (8.2) years, and the mean (SD) sMMSE score was 26.4 (1.9). 1 key finding →

Participants: 554 Evidence: high

A moderate to high intensity aerobic and strength exercise training programme does not slow cognitive impairment in people with mild to moderate dementia. 1 key finding →

Design: RCT Participants: 494 Evidence: null result

Association of Lifestyle and Genetic Risk With Incidence of Dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 78 out of 100. JAMA 2019-08-01

Among older adults without cognitive impairment or dementia, both an unfavorable lifestyle and high genetic risk were significantly associated with higher dementia risk. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 383 Evidence: moderate

The mean rate of brain atrophy per year was 0.76% [95% CI, 0.63-0.90] in the active treatment group and 1.08% [0.94-1.22] in the placebo group (P = 0.001). 2 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 271 Evidence: high

Associations of Social Isolation and Loneliness With Later Dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100. Neurology 2022-07-11

Then, voxel-wise brainwide association analyses were used to identify gray matter volumes (GMVs) associated with social isolation and with loneliness. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 462,619 Evidence: moderate

Points• UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40-69 years when recruited in 2006-2010.• The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.• Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.• UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public. 1 key finding →

Design: case-control study Participants: 500,000 Evidence: moderate

Antipsychotic use compared with non-use in adults with dementia was associated with increased risks of stroke, venous thromboembolism, myocardial infarction, heart failure, fracture, pneumonia, and acute kidney injury, but not ventricular arrhythmia. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 173,910 Evidence: moderate

We did not apply any language or date restrictions to the electronic searches, and we did not use any methodological filters as a method to restrict the search overall. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 70 Evidence: high

Observational epidemiological studies have shown a positive association between hypertension and risk of incident dementia; however, the effects of antihypertensive therapy on cognitive function in controlled trials have been conflicting, and meta-analyses of the trials have not provided clear evidence of whether antihypertensive treatment reduces dementia incidence. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,687 Evidence: high

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

Is it possible to prevent atrophy of key brain regions related to cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease (AD)? 3 key findings →

Evidence: high

Previous Cochrane reviews have considered the use of cholinesterase inhibitors in both Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). 4 key findings →

Participants: 1,236 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

The overall conversion rate from iRBD to an overt neurodegenerative syndrome was 6.3% per year, with 73.5% converting after 12-year follow-up. 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,280 Evidence: moderate

Rivastigmine for Alzheimer's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2015-04-10

Tacrine, the first of the cholinesterase inhibitors to undergo extensive trials for this purpose, was associated with significant adverse effects including hepatotoxicity. 4 key findings →

Participants: 3,232 Evidence: high

The association between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and incident dementia remains inconclusive. 4 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 5,255 Evidence: moderate

Between Feb 24, 2021, and March 5, 2023, 377 dyads were randomly assigned (1:1), 189 to usual treatment and 188 to intervention. 2 key findings →

Design: RCT Participants: 377 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 27,380 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