The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a vital boundary between neural tissue and circulating blood. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Research
31,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
For many years, the central nervous system (CNS) was considered to be 'immune privileged', neither susceptible to nor contributing to inflammation. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in mammals include c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK), p38 MAPK, and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK). 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Evidence from postmortem analysis implicates the involvement of microglia in the neurodegenerative process of several degenerative neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder of the brain, which is characterized by the formation of extracellular amyloid plaques (or senile plaques) and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, after Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Microglia are the principal immune cells in the central nervous system (CNS) and have a critical role in host defense against invading microorganisms and neoplastic cells. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Microglia in the central nervous system are usually maintained in a quiescent state. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Abnormal neuronal aggregation of alpha-synuclein is implicated in the development of many neurological disorders, including Parkinson disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Biochemical analysis of amyloid plaques revealed that the main constituent is fibrillar aggregates of a 39-42 residue peptide referred to as the amyloid-β protein (Aβ). 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Loss of neurons after brain injury and in neurodegenerative disease is often accompanied by reactive gliosis and scarring, which are difficult to reverse with existing treatment approaches. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The role of glial cells is to support and sustain proper neuronal function and microglia are no exception to this. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the world's most common dementing illness, affecting over 150 million patients. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Oxidative stress is now recognized as accountable for redox regulation involving reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
36/100
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is the specialized system of brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMVEC) that shields the brain from toxic substances in the blood, supplies brain tissues with nutrients, and filters harmful compounds from the brain back to the bloodstream. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Insulin like growth factor-1 receptor (IGF-1R) and insulin receptor (IR) signalling control vital growth, survival and metabolic functions in the brain. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The term neurodegenerative disease refers to the principal pathology associated with disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease, and it is presumed that neurodegeneration results in the clinical findings seen in patients with these diseases. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Infection of microglia with the HIV-1 SF162 macrophage-tropic strain resulted in increased Beclin1 expression, accompanied by an increase of LC3 protein levels and accumulation of LC3 reporter RFP + GFP + (yellow) puncta, suggesting that HIV-1 infection triggers autophagosome formation without promoting protein degradation by the lysosome. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Comparison of inflammatory markers between mice infected with scrapie strains 22L and RML indicated that the inflammatory responses and gene expression profiles in the brains were strikingly similar, even though these scrapie strains infect different brain regions. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Aging is the predominant risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The detection of nucleic acids by the innate immune system is an essential host response during viral infection. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Astrocyte reactivity is a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases (ND), but its effects on disease outcomes remain highly debated. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, marked by senile plaques composed of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide, neurofibrillary tangles, neuronal loss and neuroinflammation. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Chronic glial activation and neuroinflammation induced by the amyloid‐β peptide (Aβ) contribute to Alzheimer's disease ( AD ) pathology. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Whole brain irradiation remains important in the management of brain tumors. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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