84/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 84 out of 100.
·
JAMA Neurology
·
2024-03-01
This study found that a commercially available plasma p-tau217 immunoassay accurately identified biological AD, comparable with results using CSF biomarkers, with reproducible cut-offs across cohorts. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 786
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
The core biomarkers differentiated Alzheimer's disease from controls with good performance: CSF T-tau (average ratio 2·54, 95% CI 2·44-2·64, p Interpretation The core CSF biomarkers of neurodegeneration (T-tau, P-tau, and Aβ42), CSF NFL, and plasma T-tau were strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease and the core biomarkers were strongly associated with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review
Participants: 699
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
79/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 79 out of 100.
·
Brain
·
2025-02-03
Plasma %p-tau217WashU had the highest performance, with significantly higher AUCs than all the immunoassays (Pdiff < 0.007). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 998
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
79/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 79 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2023-04-01
Among 171 Aβ-positive CU participants included in the main analyses, 119 (mean [SD] age, 73.0 [5.4] years; 60.5% female) were from the BioFINDER-1 study, and 52 (mean [SD] age, 64.4 [4.6] years; 65.4% female) were from the WRAP study. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 564
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
Concentrations of plasma p-tau181 were compared with established CSF and PET biomarkers and longitudinal measurements using Spearman correlation, area under the curve (AUC), and linear regression analyses. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 1,131
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
Although recent clinical trials targeting amyloid-β in Alzheimer's disease have shown promising results, there is increasing evidence suggesting that understanding alternative disease pathways that interact with amyloid-β metabolism and amyloid pathology might be important to halt the clinical deterioration. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 75
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
77/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100.
·
Nature Aging
·
2023-08-31
Cost-effective strategies for identifying amyloid-β (Aβ) positivity in patients with cognitive impairment are urgently needed with recent approvals of anti-Aβ immunotherapies for Alzheimer's disease (AD). 2 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 348
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
77/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100.
·
JAMA Neurology
·
2024-01-01
Of a total 912 participants, there were 499 males (54.7%) and 413 females (45.3%), and the mean (SD) age was 71.1 (8.49) years. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 912
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
77/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100.
·
JAMA
·
2020-08-01
Mean age was 83.5 (SD, 8.5) years in cohort 1, 69.1 (SD, 10.3) years in cohort 2, and 35.8 (SD, 10.7) years in cohort 3; 38% were women in cohort 1, 51% in cohort 2, and 57% in cohort 3. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 301
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
77/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2025-03-31
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
76/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 76 out of 100.
·
JAMA Neurology
·
2024-09-01
In BioFINDER-2, the mean (SD) age was 65.7 (14.4) with 261 females (52.7%). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 983
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
76/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 76 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2019-07-01
The NfL level was increased at baseline in patients with mild cognitive impairment and AD dementia (mean levels: cognitive unimpairment, 32.1 ng/L; mild cognitive impairment, 37.9 ng/L; and AD dementia, 45.9 ng/L; P Conclusions and relevance The findings suggest that plasma NfL can be used as a noninvasive biomarker associated with neurodegeneration in patients with AD and may be useful to monitor effects in trials of disease-modifying drugs. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,583
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
The neuropathological confirmation of amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) remains the gold standard for a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 115
Evidence: moderate
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
76/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 76 out of 100.
·
JAMA network open
·
2025-03-03
Age, sex, and apolipoprotein E (APOE) are the strongest risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis
Participants: 4,592
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
75/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2017-05-01
Among 193 cognitively healthy controls, 197 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 180 patients with AD with dementia, plasma NFL correlated with CSF NFL (Spearman ρ = 0.59, P Conclusions and relevance Plasma NFL is associated with AD diagnosis and with cognitive, biochemical, and imaging hallmarks of the disease. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study
Participants: 197
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
75/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2021-12-01
This study suggests that plasma GFAP is a sensitive biomarker for detecting and tracking reactive astrogliosis and Aβ pathology even among individuals in the early stages of AD. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 300
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
75/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2021-04-01
Exclusion criteria included any significant neurologic disorder other than suspected AD; presence of infection, infarction, or multiple lacunes as detected by magnetic resonance imaging; and any significant systemic condition that could lead to difficulty complying with the protocol. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,113
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
75/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2020-03-02
Plasma phosphorylated tau181 (P-tau181) might be increased in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its usefulness for differential diagnosis and prognosis is unclear. 2 key findings →
Participants: 589
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Full text may need a subscription
75/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100.
·
JAMA
·
2009-07-01
During follow-up, 271 participants with MCI were diagnosed with AD and 59 with other dementias. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 750
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Full text may need a subscription
Furthermore, plasma p-tau231 was significantly increased in amyloid-β PET quartiles 2-4, whereas CSF p-tau217 and plasma p-tau181 increased only at quartiles 3-4 and 4, respectively. 2 key findings →
Participants: 588
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
74/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 74 out of 100.
·
Neurology
·
2016-09-30
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
Smoothing splines demonstrated that earliest plasma p-tau181 changes occurred even before amyloid-β markers reached abnormal levels, with greater rates of change correlating with increased amyloid-β pathology. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort
Participants: 1,067
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies →
Original source
Free full text
The panel cautions users of this guideline that there is significant variability in diagnostic test accuracy and many commercially available BBM tests do not meet these thresholds, especially using a single cutoff. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic-review
Evidence: high
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
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.