Dementia and mild cognitive impairment are significant contributors to disability and dependency in older adults. 5 key findings →
Participants: 67 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
28,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
We assessed the risk of bias of included studies using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool and the overall certainty of the evidence for each outcome using GRADE. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,122 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Data collection and analysis We initially screened search results using a 'crowdsourcing' method in which members of Cochrane's citizen science platform identify RCTs. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 400 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We found moderate-quality evidence that postoperative cognitive dysfunction at three months could be reduced in these patients. 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,929 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Selection criteria All unconfounded, double-blind, randomized controlled trials in which treatment with donepezil was compared with placebo for patients with mild, moderate or severe dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. 5 key findings →
Participants: 5,272 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Prevention of cognitive impairment and dementia is an important public health goal. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 11,140 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
There is moderate-certainty evidence regarding the benefit of multicomponent non-pharmacological interventions for the prevention of delirium in hospitalised adults, estimated to reduce incidence by 43% compared to usual care. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 22 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
To assess for potential differences in cognitive test scoring when using a remote platform, and where a remote screener was compared to the equivalent face-to-face test. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,075 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
80/100
Memantine is a moderate affinity uncompetitive antagonist of glutamate NMDA receptors. 4 key findings →
Design: post-hoc analysis Participants: 10,000 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results We included two trials with 26,340 participants aged 40 to 82 years of whom 11,610 were aged 70 or older. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,340 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia in older people. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 8,257 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found no data on our primary outcome of global cognitive function. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,183 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We found no studies on our primary outcome of global cognitive function. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,183 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Low cognitive and brain reserve and limited cognitive stimulation are associated with increased risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Participants: 6,742 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Data collection and analysis Two review authors independently assessed for inclusion all the potential studies we identified as a result of the search strategy. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 99 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
However, some (like tacrine) are associated with adverse effects such as hepatotoxicity, but donepezil (E2020, Aricept) is safer. 5 key findings →
Participants: 4,365 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Tacrine, the first of the cholinesterase inhibitors to undergo extensive trials for this purpose, was associated with significant adverse effects including hepatotoxicity. 5 key findings →
Participants: 3,370 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Main results We included 39 trials that recruited 16,082 participants, assessing 22 different interventions or comparisons. 4 key findings →
Participants: 39 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) describes a broad spectrum of cognitive impairments caused by cerebrovascular disease, ranging from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,193 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We did not apply any language or date restrictions to the electronic searches, and we did not use any methodological filters as a method to restrict the search overall. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 70 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Main results Two RCTs and one controlled before-and-after study were included (735 participants). 3 key findings →
Participants: 735 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Main results Seventeen trials with 1067 participants met the inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,067 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
RO emphasised the engagement of nursing assistants in a hopeful, therapeutic process but became associated with a rigid, confrontational approach to people with dementia, leading to its use becoming less and less common. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 718 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We undertook subgroup analysis by setting (community versus care home) and by modality (individual versus group). 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 22 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,580 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 28,580 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (62.2% of the library) and OpenAlex (17.8%), 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 (3.6% 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 →