28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Brain iron elevation is implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis, but the impact of iron on disease outcomes has not been previously explored in a longitudinal study. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
APPLE-Tree is an accessible intervention associated with small improvements in cognition, although these results were not statistically significant. 1 key finding →
Design: RCT Participants: 746 Evidence: null result
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
From the 868 Framingham Heart Study participants who returned for a second PSG, this cohort included 346 participants with a mean age of 69 years (range, 60-87 years); 179 (52%) were female. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 346 Evidence: early
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Patients with FTLD were distributed between FTLD-tau (34 patients: 10 corticobasal degeneration, nine progressive supranuclear palsy, eight Pick's disease, three frontotemporal dementia with parkinsonism associated with chromosome 17, three unclassifiable tauopathy, and one argyrophilic grain disease); FTLD-TDP (55 patients: nine type A including one with motor neuron disease, 27 type B including 21 with motor neuron disease, eight type C with right temporal lobe presentations, and 11 unclassifiable including eight with motor neuron disease), FTLD-FUS (eight patients), and one patient with FTLD-ubiquitin proteasome system positive inclusions (FTLD-UPS) that stained negatively for tau, TDP-43, and FUS. 4 key findings →
Participants: 438 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Accumulating data suggest that cerebrovascular disease contributes to Alzheimer's disease pathophysiology and progression toward dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,722 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The heterogeneity of neurodegenerative diseases is a key confound to disease understanding and treatment development, as study cohorts typically include multiple phenotypes on distinct disease trajectories. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Elevated blood pressure during midlife, persistence of elevated blood pressure into late life, and, among nonhypertensives, a steep decline in blood pressure during mid- to late life were associated with an increased dementia risk in a community-based cohort. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,440 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia risk may be attenuated by physical activity (PA); however, the specific activity levels optimal for dementia prevention are unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,604 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among eligible participants (n = 705,061), 264,294 individuals (37.5% of eligible participants) initiated any statin during 2001-2010 ("initiators"), of whom 249,613 (94.4%) were matched with 255,937 unique noninitiators to create the analytic sample (322,358 unique participants; mean age at baseline = 67.4 years; 55.1% female). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 322,358 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Higher concentrations of serum biomarkers were associated with the development of clinical AD; especially, the time-specific associations were notable: t-tau 8 to 16 years, and Nf-L and GFAP 4 to 8 years prior to clinical AD. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,327 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Blood biomarkers showed significant longitudinal changes corresponding to cognitive decline, clinical AD, and structural MRI characteristics. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,327 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Longitudinal clinical-pathological studies have increasingly recognized the importance of mixed pathologies (the coexistence of one or more neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disease pathologies) as important factors in the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Hippocampal volume was the primary determinant of memory decline, whereas executive function (EXEC) decline was related to multiple brain components. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 103 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The development of MCI is associated with measurements of cognition and depression, racial and constitutional factors, and cerebrovascular disease. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 927 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is the second most common cause of presenile dementia. 1 key finding →
Participants: 515 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition marked by a decline in cognitive functions with no validated disease modifying treatment. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study found that a high-intensity multidomain lifestyle intervention did not affect brain biomarker trajectories and was not associated with Aβ pathology, but older adults with specific at-risk brain characteristics, including lower baseline HC volume, showed a greater cognitive benefit of the structured intervention. 4 key findings →
Design: RCT Participants: 983 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this study, terminating metformin treatment was associated with increased dementia incidence. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 41,346 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Physical exercise has been shown to increase brain volume and improve cognition in randomized trials of non-demented elderly. 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These results suggest that WMH primarily affect the risk of progression when CSF measures of neurodegeneration or neuronal injury (as reflected by t-tau) are low. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 274 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Most healthy elderly people did not experience cognitive decline. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 5,201 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
These studies fundamentally deepen our understanding of AD progression and its underlying genetic basis, which in turn informs and improves clinical trial design. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Sample 1 included 1656 participants (mean [range] age, 58.1 [29.7-85.6] years; 903 female [54.5%]), and sample 2 included 935 participants (mean [range] age, 67.6 [60.0-85.6] years; 518 female [55.4%]). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,656 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Classification resulted in 227 persons with prevalent dementia at entry into the study and 480 incident cases during follow-up. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 227 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 28,180 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 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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 →