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Find studies

Showing 1–19 of 19 studies by Sperling RA · free to read · tagged Early Stage · 27,380 in the whole library · How the 0–100 score works

Browse by subject, author or institution

Each number is how many studies that link shows, with your other filters kept.

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Association Between Elevated Brain Amyloid and Subsequent Cognitive Decline Among Cognitively Normal Persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. JAMA 2017-06-01

Among the 445 participants (243 with normal amyloid, 202 with elevated amyloid), mean (SD) age was 74.0 (5.9) years, mean education was 16.4 (2.7) years, and 52% were women. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 243 Evidence: moderate

The pathophysiological process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is thought to begin many years before the diagnosis of AD dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

Association of Factors With Elevated Amyloid Burden in Clinically Normal Older Individuals

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2020-06-01

The large number of participants screened with amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) and standardized assessments provides an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate factors associated with elevated brain amyloid. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 4,486 Evidence: low

The preclinical Alzheimer cognitive composite: measuring amyloid-related decline

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 65 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2014-08-01

In ADNI, Aβ-positive participants showed more decline than did Aβ-negative participants with regard to the ADCS-PACC score at 24 months (mean [SE] difference, -1.239 [0.522] [95% CI, -2.263 to -0.215]; P = .02). 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

This study suggests that early tau deposition may follow multiple trajectories during preclinical AD and may involve several cortical regions. 3 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 447 Evidence: moderate

The data are consistent with expected rates of amyloid positivity among individuals with clinical diagnoses of AD and MCI, and indicate the potential value of florbetapir F18 PET as an adjunct to clinical diagnosis. 2 key findings →

Design: clinical trial Participants: 184 Evidence: low

From a longitudinal study of normal (Clinical Dementia Rating [CDR] = 0; n = 77) and mildly impaired (CDR = 0.5; n = 167) participants with 5 or more annual clinical assessments, baseline level of cognitive impairment in daily life was graded using CDR sum of boxes (CDR-SB) and level of cognitive performance impairment was graded using neuropsychological test scores. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 77 Evidence: moderate

Association of Higher Cortical Amyloid Burden With Loneliness in Cognitively Normal Older Adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 60 out of 100. JAMA psychiatry 2016-12-01

Loneliness is a perceived state of social and emotional isolation that has been associated with cognitive and functional decline and an increased risk of incident AD dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 25 Evidence: low

Plasma GFAP is a prognostic biomarker in CU older adults, predicting cognitive and biological changes, with stronger associations observed in females, highlighting a possible sex-specific vulnerability. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort Participants: 949 Evidence: moderate

This relationship was evident even after accounting for degree of memory deficit across the continuum of cognitive impairment and dementia. 2 key findings →

Participants: 793 Evidence: moderate

Florbetapir F 18 amyloid PET and 36-month cognitive decline: a prospective multicenter study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 56 out of 100. Molecular psychiatry 2014-03-11

This study was designed to evaluate whether subjects with amyloid beta (Aβ) pathology, detected using florbetapir positron emission tomorgraphy (PET), demonstrated greater cognitive decline than subjects without Aβ pathology. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Odor identification and Alzheimer disease biomarkers in clinically normal elderly

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 55 out of 100. Neurology 2015-05-01

Our objective was to investigate cross-sectional associations between odor identification ability and imaging biomarkers of neurodegeneration and amyloid deposition in clinically normal (CN) elderly individuals, specifically testing the hypothesis that there may be an interaction between amyloid deposition and neurodegeneration in predicting odor identification dysfunction. 1 key finding →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low

A decline in instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) correlates with the progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia and has been associated with frontal and parietal hypometabolism, lower cerebrospinal fluid amyloid β 1-42 , and inferior temporal cortical thinning. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low

25 older individuals with MCI performed a visual scene encoding task during fMRI scanning, and were followed clinically for at least 4 years after scanning. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Impairment in instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) heralds the transition from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia and is a major source of burden for both the patient and caregiver. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

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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.

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.

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 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed