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.

Our analysis encompassed 22 RCTs involving 138,282 participants (mean age 64.8 years, 36.4% female). 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 138,282 Evidence: high

The intervention was feasible and acceptable with the intended number of participants completing the study. 5 key findings →

Participants: 104 Evidence: high

Western diet is associated with a smaller hippocampus: a longitudinal investigation

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 79 out of 100. BMC medicine 2015-09-08

Lower intakes of nutrient-dense foods and higher intakes of unhealthy foods are each independently associated with smaller left hippocampal volume. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 255 Evidence: high

The cohort study revealed that persistent HI significantly increased the risk of heart disease (P < 0.001, HR 1.63, 95% CI 1.31-2.03), stroke (P 0.004, HR 1.59, 95% CI 1.16-2.18), chronic lung disease (P 0.002, HR 1.53, 95% CI 1.17-1.99), and emotional, nervous, or psychiatric problems (P 0.016, HR 2.03, 95% CI 1.14-3.60). 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 504,307 Evidence: moderate

Increased absolute sugar intake (g/day) was significantly associated with a higher risk of all-cause dementia (HR = 1.003, [95%CI: 1.002-1.004], p < 0.001) and Alzheimer's disease (1.002, [1.001-1.004], 0.005). 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 210,832 Evidence: moderate

Studies implementing research methods (30 studies) demonstrated the role of family members as both proxy decision-makers and supporting decision-making for the person with impaired capacity. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 19 Evidence: high

Higher adherence to a MedDiet was associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic risk, underlining the importance of diet in dementia prevention interventions. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 60,298 Evidence: moderate

The search yielded 115 distinctly named non-genetic risk and protective factors with a significant association, with various strengths of evidence. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

Peripheral GFAP and NfL as early biomarkers for dementia: longitudinal insights from the UK Biobank

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 69 out of 100. BMC medicine 2024-05-13

Peripheral glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and neurofilament light chain (NfL) are sensitive markers of neuroinflammation and neuronal damage. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 48,542 Evidence: moderate

Pre- and postoperative orthogeriatric care given in an acute geriatric ward was not effective in reducing delirium or long-term cognitive impairment in patients with hip fracture. 5 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 329 Evidence: high

Our findings showed significant associations between hearing and vision impairments and increased risks of all-cause and cause-specific dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 937,908 Evidence: moderate

Increasing evidence suggests an association between pro-inflammatory diets and cognitive function. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,372 Evidence: moderate

Antidepressant use and cognitive decline in patients with dementia: a national cohort study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. BMC Medicine 2025-02-24

We included 18740 patients (10 205 women [54.5%]; mean [SD] age, 78.2[7.4] years), of which 4271 (22.8%) received at least one prescription for an antidepressant. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 18,740 Evidence: moderate

Higher adherence to the MedDiet was associated with greater gut microbial diversity (p < 0.05) and distinct microbial composition (PERMANOVA, p = 0.001). 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 746 Evidence: moderate

Sex differences in major cardiovascular risk factors for incident (fatal or non-fatal) all-cause dementia were assessed in the UK Biobank. 4 key findings →

Participants: 502,226 Evidence: low

A total of 162 studies were included, with 88 (54.3%) exploring potential risk factors and 74 (45.7%) examining specific risk factors. 5 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 162 Evidence: moderate

CSD is common in older inpatients and associated with considerably worse outcomes, with little variation between different types of CSD. 4 key findings →

Participants: 10,014 Evidence: moderate

Improving comfort in people with dementia and pneumonia: a cluster randomized trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 59 out of 100. BMC medicine 2016-08-11

When compared to usual care, the practice guideline for optimal symptom relief did not relieve discomfort and symptoms in nursing home residents with dementia and pneumonia. 4 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 16 Evidence: high

Eighty older adults with MCI (median age 86.50 years) participated, with an average attendance rate of 86.25% in the intervention group. 5 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial 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