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.

Effect of citalopram on agitation in Alzheimer disease: the CitAD randomized clinical trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 82 out of 100. JAMA 2014-02-01

Among patients with probable Alzheimer disease and agitation who were receiving psychosocial intervention, the addition of citalopram compared with placebo significantly reduced agitation and caregiver distress; however, cognitive and cardiac adverse effects of citalopram may limit its practical application at the dosage of 30 mg per day. 5 key findings →

Participants: 186 Evidence: high

Escitalopram for agitation in Alzheimer's dementia: a randomized controlled phase 3 trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 74 out of 100. Nature Medicine 2025-03-25

Citalopram is effective in treating agitation in Alzheimer's dementia (AD), but it is associated with cognitive and cardiac risks, likely due to its R-enantiomer. 5 key findings →

Design: phase-3-trial Participants: 173 Evidence: null result

Of 5687 unique abstracts, 255 were selected for full-text review, and 57 studies, representing 20 892 patients, met all inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →

Participants: 892 Evidence: low

We analyzed 1,240 MRIs from 473 patients (age: 69.2 ± 7.4 [range: 49-87]; 32.8% women). 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,240 Evidence: moderate

Although antipsychotics were associated with greater harm than antidepressants and anticonvulsants in subgroups of persons with dementia, medications used in lieu of antipsychotics for treating neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia, such as anticonvulsants and dextromethorphan-quinidine, were also associated with harm. 5 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 209 Evidence: high

The burden of AD dementia is substantial. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 1,000 Evidence: high

Plasma phosphorylated tau at threonine 181 (p-tau181), a well-validated marker of Alzheimer disease (AD) pathologic change, could be a more efficient way to diagnose AD than invasive or expensive biomarkers requiring CSF or PET. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 571 Evidence: moderate

Population-based estimates for the epidemiology of FTD varied widely in the included studies. 2 key findings →

Participants: 1,000 Evidence: low

DLB becomes more common with increasing age and accounts for about 5% of all dementia cases in older populations. 1 key finding →

Participants: 1,000 Evidence: low

An international working group from the Centres of Excellence in Neurodegeneration completed a structured process to develop definitions and imaging standards for markers and consequences of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD). 3 key findings →

Evidence: low

Medical, surgical, and physical treatments for Parkinson's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Lancet (London, England) 2024-01-01

Although dopamine replacement therapy remains a core component of Parkinson's disease treatment, the onset of motor fluctuations and dyskinetic movements might require a range of medical and surgical approaches from a multidisciplinary team, and important new approaches in the delivery of dopamine replacement are becoming available. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Three survey rounds included 49 to 54 participants that agreed on VasCog-2 diagnostic criteria for preclinical, mild, and major dementia levels of vascular cognitive impairment (under the overarching term VCID). 5 key findings →

Participants: 49 Evidence: low

Ambroxol as a Treatment for Parkinson Disease Dementia: A Randomized Clinical Trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 58 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2025-06-30

Mean (SD) β-glucocerebrosidase levels were higher at week 26 (ambroxol, 12.45 [1.97] nmol/h/mg; 91% CI, 11.54-13.36 nmol/h/mg); placebo, 8.50 [1.96] nmol/h/mg; 91% CI, 7.65-9.34 nmol/h/mg; P = .05) in the ambroxol group compared with placebo. 3 key findings →

Design: clinical trial Participants: 75 Evidence: high

Disease-modifying drug use necessitates better Alzheimer disease (AD) detection. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate

White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are frequently seen on brain magnetic resonance imaging scans of older people. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

Early cerebral small vessel disease and brain volume, cognition, and gait

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2015-02-01

Covert cerebrovascular disease and its consequences on cognitive and gait performance and brain atrophy are manifest in some clinically asymptomatic persons as early as the 5th decade of life. 3 key findings →

Participants: 803 Evidence: low

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are common in dementia and in predementia syndromes such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). 2 key findings →

Evidence: low

MBI may be an earlier marker of neurodegenerative disease than MCI, captured at the stage of subjective cognitive decline or before, raising the possibility that MBI represents a novel target for dementia clinical trials or prevention strategies. 3 key findings →

Participants: 9,931 Evidence: low

Baseline NPS, categorized for MBI domain and duration, have prognostic utility in addition to brain morphology measures for predicting diagnosis change using ML. 2 key findings →

Participants: 102 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
  • 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