27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Atypical antipsychotic drugs may be associated with a small increased risk for death compared with placebo. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,353 Evidence: high
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Following reports of meningoencephalitis (overall 18/300 [6%]), immunization was stopped after one (2 patients), two (274 patients), or three (24 patients) injections. 3 key findings →
Participants: 300 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Evidence from well-planned, representative epidemiological surveys is scarce in many regions. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In total, 994 patients received cholinesterase inhibitor treatment (rivastigmine, n = 495; donepezil, n = 499), and 57.9% of patients completed the study. 5 key findings →
Participants: 495 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Leisure-time physical activity at midlife at least twice a week was associated with a reduced risk of dementia and AD (odds ratio [OR] 0.48 [95% CI 0.25-0.91] and 0.38 [0.17-0.85], respectively), even after adjustments for age, sex, education, follow-up time, locomotor disorders, APOE genotype, vascular disorders, smoking, and alcohol drinking. 2 key findings →
Participants: 1,449 Evidence: moderate
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Substantial variation in the prevalence of dementia in Parkinson's disease (PDD) has been reported. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 1,767 Evidence: high
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In a 24-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter study of rivastigmine, 487 patients with dementia associated with Parkinson disease underwent assessment of attention on the Cognitive Drug Research computerized cognitive assessment system before dosing and 16 and 24 weeks later. 2 key findings →
Participants: 487 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Two hundred eighty-eight patients had paired scans (mean interval 10.9 months). 2 key findings →
Participants: 45 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The presence of multiple cardiovascular risk factors at midlife substantially increases risk of late-life dementia in a dose dependent manner. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 8,845 Evidence: moderate
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This pilot study was unable to demonstrate a benefit for donepezil in preventing or treating delirium in a relatively young and cognitively-intact group of elderly patients undergoing elective orthopedic surgery. 2 key findings →
Participants: 80 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This study demonstrates robust evidence that complex patterns of mental activity in the early, mid- and late-life stages is associated with a significant reduction in dementia incidence. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 29,000 Evidence: high
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Over the last decade a significant number of studies have reported smaller hippocampal volume in individuals with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) relative to control groups, and in some cases hemispheric asymmetries in this effect have been noted. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 13 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Inflammatory mechanisms have been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and might be mediated via the COX-2 enzyme. 3 key findings →
Participants: 725 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
However, the advisory did not apply to conventional antipsychotic medications; the risk of death with these older agents is not known. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 22,890 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Older adults with CVD other than stroke had a higher risk of dementia and AD than did those without CVD. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 3,602 Evidence: moderate
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These findings are consistent with smaller hippocampal volume in adult subjects with chronic PTSD. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 133 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
ementia refers to a syndrome that is characterised by progressive deterioration of cognitive functions. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
High cholesterol in late life was associated with decreased dementia risk, which is in contrast to previous studies suggesting high cholesterol in mid-life is a risk factor for later dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 392 Evidence: moderate
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Vitamin E had no benefit in patients with mild cognitive impairment. 5 key findings →
Participants: 769 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Atypical antipsychotics are associated with an increased risk of stroke. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Tracking over 10,000 people for 27 years, this landmark study found that being obese in midlife (in your 40s) nearly doubled the risk of developing dementia decades later, and being overweight also raised the risk, independent of whether someone later developed diabetes or heart disease. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,276 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A randomized, controlled trial. 1 key finding →
Participants: 17 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Nondemented individuals exhibit a slow rate of whole-brain atrophy from early in adulthood with white-matter loss beginning in middle age; in older adults, the onset of dementia of the Alzheimer type is associated with a markedly accelerated atrophy rate. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 192 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Because of flawed methods and small clinical benefits, the scientific basis for recommendations of cholinesterase inhibitors for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease is questionable. 2 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Atorvastatin treatment may be of some clinical benefit and could be established as an effective therapy for Alzheimer disease if the current findings are substantiated by a much larger multicenter trial. 3 key findings →
Participants: 98 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 →