Rates of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are extremely heterogeneous. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Participants: 3,397 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
31,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Ann Neurol 2018;84:737-748. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 443 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Whilst cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and positron emission tomography (PET) biomarkers for amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau pathologies are accurate for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), their broad implementation in clinical and trial settings are restricted by high cost and limited accessibility. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,000 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
With the emergence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) disease-modifying therapies, identifying patients who could benefit from these treatments becomes critical. 1 key finding →
Participants: 1,422 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Plasma tau partly reflects AD pathology, but the overlap between normal aging and AD is large, especially in patients without dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 179 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We tested the hypothesis that plasma neurofilament light chain (NfL) identifies asymptomatic carriers of familial frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD)-causing mutations at risk of disease progression. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 277 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Amyloid-beta 42 (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) reflect core features of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) more directly than clinical diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Participants: 8,074 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a longitudinal multisite observational study of healthy elders, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increased cerebrospinal fluid neurofilament light (NfL) is a recognized biomarker for neurodegeneration that can also be assessed in blood. 1 key finding →
Participants: 805 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Predicting not just if, but also when, cognitively unimpaired individuals are likely to develop onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptoms would be useful to clinical trials and, eventually, clinical practice. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 603 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings suggest that this blood biomarker test could allow for distinguishing individuals with brain amyloid-positive PET findings from individuals with amyloid-negative PET findings and serve as an aid for Alzheimer disease diagnosis. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 249 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Levels of plasma p-tau217 increased significantly in Aβ+ participants before showing significant deceleration (χ2 = 21.7; P Conclusions and relevance This study found that tau PET is valuable for both prognostic and real-time tracking of disease progression. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,707 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These data support the use of cNfL as a biomarker of neuroaxonal damage and indicate that age-specific and sex-specific (and in some cases disease-specific) reference values may be needed. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,795 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
TREM2 is a transmembrane receptor that is predominantly expressed by microglia in the central nervous system. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,027 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increasing evidence suggests an important role of liver function in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,581 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study shows that PUTG component scores were significantly associated with diagnostic group and AD biomarkers, a finding that was more pronounced in APOE ε4 carriers. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 689 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Brain iron elevation is implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis, but the impact of iron on disease outcomes has not been previously explored in a longitudinal study. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
A total of 716 individuals were included in the analysis: 413 cognitively unimpaired (CU) participants (58.6% female; mean age = 70.6 years, SD = 7.9) and 303 cognitively impaired (CI) participants (54.7% female; mean age = 73.2 years, SD = 7.4). 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 716 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cerebrospinal fluid NFL concentration (median [interquartile range]) was higher in the AD dementia group (1479 [1134-1842] pg/mL), stable MCI group (no progression to AD during follow-up; 1182 [923-1687] pg/mL), and progressive MCI group (MCI with progression to AD dementia during follow-up; 1336 [1061-1693] pg/mL) compared with control participants (1047 [809-1265] pg/mL) (P Conclusions and relevance Cerebrospinal fluid NFL concentration is increased by the early clinical stage of AD and is associated with cognitive deterioration and structural brain changes over time. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 95 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Neurofilament proteins have been validated as specific body fluid biomarkers of neuro-axonal injury. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 is a robust measure for detecting amyloid plaques and can be utilized to aid in the diagnosis of AD, identify those at risk for future dementia due to AD, and improve the diversity of populations enrolled in AD research and clinical trials. 3 key findings →
Participants: 465 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Blood biomarkers able to diagnose Alzheimer disease (AD) at the preclinical stage would enable trial enrollment when the disease is potentially reversible. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 161 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Of 386 participants, 199 (52%) were female, and the mean (SD) age was 68 (8) years. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 113 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increasing evidence indicates that physical activity and exercise training may delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition marked by a decline in cognitive functions with no validated disease modifying treatment. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
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
- Randomized / 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
- Multicenter 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 31,380 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 31,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.2%), 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.
1,048 records (3.3% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 973 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 Where this research is being discussed: events