27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Where appropriate, we undertook subgroup analysis by modality (individual versus group), number of sessions and frequency, setting (community versus care home), type of control condition and dementia severity. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 37 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Previous Cochrane reviews have considered the use of cholinesterase inhibitors in both Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,236 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
It has been suggested that various different vitamin and mineral supplements might be useful in maintaining cognitive function and delaying the onset of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 516 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Tacrine, the first of the cholinesterase inhibitors to undergo extensive trials for this purpose, was associated with significant adverse effects including hepatotoxicity. 4 key findings →
Participants: 3,232 Evidence: high
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The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the best-known and the most often used short screening tool for providing an overall measure of cognitive impairment in clinical, research and community settings. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Nine studies (from eight published reports) of 5149 individuals with mild cognitive impairment (however defined) were included in the review. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 5,149 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Since the introduction of the first cholinesterase inhibitor (ChEI) in 1997, most clinicians and probably most patients would consider the cholinergic drugs, donepezil, galantamine and rivastigmine, to be the first line pharmacotherapy for mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Galantamine is a specific, competitive, and reversible acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. 4 key findings →
Participants: 6,805 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Effect of memantine in patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease: analysis of the change from baseline at 28 weeks gave statistically significant results in favour of memantine for 20 mg/day on cognition (MD: 6.1. 95% CI 2.99 to 9.21, P=0.0001) activities of daily living (MD 2.10, 95% CI 0.46 to 3.74, p=0.01) and in the global clinical impression of change measured by the CIBIC-Plus at 28 weeks (MD -0.30, 95% CI -0.58 to -0.02, p=0.04), in all cases the analysis was the ITT-LOCF population (Reisberg 2000). 5 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Patients taking memantine were slightly less likely to develop agitation (134/1739, 7.7% versus 175/1873, 9.3% OR 0.78, 95% CI 0.61 to 0.99, P = 0.04). 1 key finding →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Analysis included patients treated with an atypical antipsychotic, compared with placebo Main results Sixteen placebo controlled trials have been completed with atypical antipsychotics although only nine had sufficient data to contribute to a meta-analysis and only five have been published in full in peer reviewed journals. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We included 22 studies involving 43,637 women. 5 key findings →
Participants: 22 Evidence: high
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Selection criteria We included randomised controlled trials where the participants had PDD or PD-MCI, and where the intervention was intended to train general or specific areas of cognitive function, targeting either a single domain or multiple domains of cognition, and was compared to a control condition. 5 key findings →
Participants: 225 Evidence: high
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Main results Outcome data were available in 202 out of 234 included trials, investigating 60 clinical conditions. 1 key finding →
Participants: 6,041 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In clinical samples, people with amnestic MCI are at high risk of developing Alzheimer's disease dementia, with annual rates of progression from MCI to Alzheimer's disease estimated at approximately 10% to 15% compared with the base incidence rates of Alzheimer's disease dementia of 1% to 2% per year. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 33 Evidence: moderate
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Selection criteria We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-RCTs in which cognitive training via interactive computerised technology was compared with an active or inactive control intervention. 5 key findings →
Participants: 660 Evidence: high
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Dementia is a progressive syndrome of global cognitive impairment with significant health and social care costs. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 9,422 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results We included 82 studies with 10,613 participants; 72 studies with 9783 participants provided extractable data. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 10,613 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's disease sufferers have been found to have a lack of the enzyme responsible for converting choline into acetylcholine within the brain. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 265 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
It is associated with increases in mortality, physical morbidity, length of hospital stay, institutionalisation and costs to healthcare providers. 4 key findings →
Participants: 833 Evidence: high
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Vitamins and minerals play multiple functions within the central nervous system which may help to maintain brain health and optimal cognitive functioning. 4 key findings →
Participants: 28 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
¹⁸F-FDFG uptake by brain tissue as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) is a well-established method for assessment of brain function in people with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 14 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Where feasible, we combined data to obtain an overall estimate of effect. 4 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Overall estimates of treatment effect were calculated using a fixed-effect model, and statistical heterogeneity was measured using a standard Chi(2) statistic. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Four trials including 15,936 hypertensive subjects were identified. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 →