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.

During a mean follow-up of 3.9 years, dementia was documented in 193 (6.3%) of the 3051 randomized participants in the actively treated group and 217 (7.1%) of the 3054 randomized participants in the placebo group (relative risk reduction, 12% [95% confidence interval, -8% to 28%]; P =.2). 4 key findings →

Participants: 6,105 Evidence: high

Median follow-up increased from 2.0 years in the double-blind trial to 3.9 years overall. 2 key findings →

Participants: 1,485 Evidence: high

The use of donepezil produced statistically significant improvements in ADAS-cog, CIBIC plus, and Mini-Mental State Examination scores, relative to placebo. 2 key findings →

Design: clinical trial Participants: 468 Evidence: high

Vitamin D and risk of cognitive decline in elderly persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. Archives of internal medicine 2010-07-01

Low levels of vitamin D were associated with substantial cognitive decline in the elderly population studied over a 6-year period, which raises important new possibilities for treatment and prevention. 5 key findings →

Participants: 858 Evidence: low

These results should be confirmed with a randomized clinical trial of a centrally active ACE inhibitor in the prevention of cognitive decline and dementia. 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,054 Evidence: high

Three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 6 single-case designs (SCDs; N of 1 trials) met inclusion criteria. 4 key findings →

Evidence: high

Estrogen replacement therapy and risk of Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. Archives of internal medicine 1996-10-01

This study suggests that estrogen replacement therapy may be useful for preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease in postmenopausal women. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

In this large, population-based cohort, baseline and long-term average serum total cholesterol levels were not associated with the risk for incident AD. 3 key findings →

Participants: 1,026 Evidence: moderate

During the 6534 person-years of follow-up (mean, 5.02 years per person), 440 subjects were diagnosed as having dementia, including 333 with Alzheimer disease. 3 key findings →

Participants: 1,301 Evidence: moderate

Exposure to ACH medications is independently and specifically associated with a subsequent increase in delirium symptom severity in elderly medical inpatients with diagnosed delirium. 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 278 Evidence: moderate

There are specific risk factors associated with feeding tube placement in nursing home residents with severe cognitive impairment. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

Heavy smoking in midlife and long-term risk of Alzheimer disease and vascular dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 53 out of 100. Archives of internal medicine 2010-10-25

In this large cohort, heavy smoking in midlife was associated with a greater than 100% increase in risk of dementia, AD, and VaD more than 2 decades later. 5 key findings →

Participants: 5,367 Evidence: moderate

Antipsychotic therapy and short-term serious events in older adults with dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 52 out of 100. Archives of internal medicine 2008-05-01

Serious events, as indicated by a hospital admission or death, are frequent following the short-term use of antipsychotic drugs in older adults with dementia. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

Mortality and cancer incidence among individuals with Down syndrome

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 52 out of 100. Archives of internal medicine 2003-03-01

Individuals with DS have a substantially increased risk of mortality due to specific causes and may have an elevated risk of other incident cancers in addition to leukemia. 4 key findings →

Participants: 22 Evidence: moderate

Use of cholinesterase inhibitors is associated with increased rates of syncope, bradycardia, pacemaker insertion, and hip fracture in older adults with dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

This study confirms that healthy senior citizens as well as senior citizens with underlying medical conditions are at risk for the serious complications of influenza and benefit from vaccination. 2 key findings →

Participants: 20,000 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