29,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
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
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
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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
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The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the best-known and the most often used short screening tool for providing an overall measure of cognitive impairment in clinical, research and community settings. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Of 5687 unique abstracts, 255 were selected for full-text review, and 57 studies, representing 20 892 patients, met all inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →
Participants: 892 Evidence: low
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The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the best-known and the most often used short screening tool for providing an overall measure of cognitive impairment in clinical, research and community settings. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Reductions in cerebral glucose metabolic rate (CMRglu) as measured by fludeoxyglucose F 18-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) in parietotemporal, frontal, and cingulate cortices are associated with increased AD risk and can be observed years before dementia onset. 4 key findings →
Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found that the mass spectrometry-based p-tau217 (p-tau217WashU) exhibited significantly better performance than all other plasma p-tau biomarkers when detecting abnormal Aβ status [area under curve (AUC) = 0.947; Pdiff 0.09), but higher compared with AUC of p-tau231UGOT, p-tau181Lilly, p-tau181UGOT, p-tau181Fuji and p-tau181Splex (AUCrange 0.642-0.813; Pdiff ≤ 0.029). 5 key findings →
Participants: 135 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
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The mean (SD) age of the study population sample (N = 3496) was 76.4 (7.6) years, and 2095 participants (60%) were female. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 3,496 Evidence: moderate
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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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Elderly people taking anticholinergic drugs had significant deficits in cognitive functioning and were highly likely to be classified as mildly cognitively impaired, although not at increased risk for dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 372 Evidence: moderate
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It has been assumed that each MCI subtype is associated with an increased risk for a particular type of dementia. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Depressive symptoms were associated with increased risk of MCI, and this association was independent of underlying vascular disease. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,220 Evidence: moderate
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The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, but not the Mini-Mental State Examination, has adequate psychometric properties as a screening instrument for the detection of mild cognitive impairment or dementia in Parkinson disease. 3 key findings →
Participants: 132 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Insulin resistance causes diminished glucose uptake in similar regions of the brain in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 26 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a multi-center study assessing neuroimaging in diagnosis and longitudinal monitoring. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 339 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The MMSE is the most widely used cognitive test but its accuracy and clinical utility in diagnosing cognitive disorders is not fully known. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
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MoCA and MMSE were more similar for dementia cases, but MoCA distributes MCI cases across a broader score range with less ceiling effect. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 219 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), we examined the temporal unfolding of declining performance on tests of episodic memory (Free Recall on the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test), executive function (Category Fluency, Letter Fluency, and Trails), and Verbal Intelligence (Nelson, 1982; American Version of the Nelson Adult Reading Test [AMNART]) before the diagnosis of dementia in 92 subjects with incident Alzheimer's disease (AD) followed for up to 15 years before diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 92 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The prodromal phase of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) includes (1) mild cognitive impairment (MCI), (2) delirium-onset, and (3) psychiatric-onset presentations. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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AD-signature cortical thinning in CN-AD converters in both samples was remarkably similar, about 0.2 mm (p 1). 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Parkinson's disease has a long prodromal stage with various subclinical motor and non-motor manifestations; however, their evolution in the years before Parkinson's disease is diagnosed is unclear. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Fourteen studies met the inclusion criteria and reported quantitative gait (n = 11) or postural balance (n = 4) parameters to be included in the meta-analysis. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia due to Alzheimer disease is preceded by about 5 to 6 years of accelerated decline in multiple cognitive functions. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 2,071 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 29,380 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 29,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (63.3% of the library) and OpenAlex (17.3%), 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.
1,037 records (3.5% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 964 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 →