27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The authors assessed the association of smoking with dementia and cognitive decline in a meta-analysis of 19 prospective studies with at least 12 months of follow-up. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,374 Evidence: high
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Evidence on the association between air pollution and dementia is accumulating but still inconclusive, and the potential effect modification by genetics is unclear. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 227,840 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Studying causal exposure effects on dementia is challenging when death is a competing event. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Both early life and adult socioeconomic status (SES) predict late-life level of memory; however, evidence is mixed on the relationship between SES and rate of memory decline. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 10,781 Evidence: moderate
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To assess age-, sex-, and subtype-specific incidence rates of dementia and to calculate the risk of dementia, the authors performed a large, community-based, prospective cohort study on dementia as part of the Rotterdam Study. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 7,046 Evidence: moderate
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Studies of long-term cognitive change should account for the potential effects of education on the outcome, since some studies have demonstrated an association of education with dementia risk. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 14,020 Evidence: moderate
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It is unclear whether persons with diabetes are at increased risk for dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Healthy lifestyles are promising targets for prevention of cognitive aging, yet the optimal time windows for interventions remain unclear. 2 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 1,496 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Although psychotropic drug use has been associated with increased risk of falls in long-term care settings; this association may be confounded by the high prevalence of dementia and depression and other fall risk factors. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 178 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Sidewalks are indispensable environmental resources for daily life in that they encourage physical activity. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 76,053 Evidence: moderate
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Recent findings suggest that a rich social network may decrease the risk of developing dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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The authors explored the possibility that estrogen loss associated with menopause may contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease by using a case-control study nested within a prospective cohort study. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Research on the relation between diabetes mellitus and dementia has produced conflicting results, and the relation has not been investigated among Blacks and Hispanics. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Although many studies have found a cross-sectional relation between depression and dementia or depressive symptomatology and cognitive functioning, the direction of the association is still unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,600 Evidence: moderate
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A prospective analysis of risk factors for Alzheimer's disease was a major objective of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging, a nationwide, population-based study. 3 key findings →
Participants: 194 Evidence: low
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The UK Biobank cohort is a population-based cohort of 500,000 participants recruited in the United Kingdom (UK) between 2006 and 2010.
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Reliable population estimates of life expectancy with dementia are required for shaping health-care policy. 4 key findings →
Participants: 10,348 Evidence: low
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Increasing oily fish intake has been proposed as a strategy for Alzheimer's disease (AD) prevention, but evidence for long-term benefit remains limited. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 2,012 Evidence: null result
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Antioxidants have been hypothesized to protect against Alzheimer's disease, but studies conducted in late life have been inconsistent. 2 key findings →
Participants: 2,459 Evidence: low
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Repetitive head trauma is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and is the primary cause of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The authors investigated the hypothesis that exposure to pesticides could be related to central nervous system disorders in a prospective cohort study of 1,507 French elderly (1992-1998). 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Selenium is a trace element associated with antioxidant activity and is considered to be a protective agent against free radicals through enhanced enzyme activity. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
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The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) measures global cognitive performance and is often used as a screening test for dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
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We investigated trends in the incidence of parkinsonism and Parkinson disease (PD) by comparing data from the first 2 subcohorts of the Rotterdam Study, a prospective, population-based cohort study (first subcohort: baseline 1990 with 10 years of follow-up; second subcohort, baseline 2000 with 10 years of follow-up). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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A case-control study among 184 matched pairs of patients 65 years of age and older was undertaken to identify risk factors associated with falls and injuries in a long-term care facility in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1984-1985. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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 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.
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 →