Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

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.

We found a sequence to pathological changes, with rates of Aβ deposition in mutation carriers being significantly different from those in non-carriers first (across regions that showed a significant difference, at a mean of 18·9 years [SD 3·3] before expected onset), followed by hypometabolism (14·1 years [5·1] before expected onset), and lastly structural decline (4·7 years [4·2] before expected onset). 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 346 Evidence: moderate

Symptom onset in autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100. Neurology 2014-06-13

Significant proportions of the observed variance in age at symptom onset in ADAD can be explained by family history and mutation type, providing empirical support for use of these data to estimate onset in clinical research. 2 key findings →

Participants: 3,275 Evidence: low

Plasma Phosphorylated Tau 217 to Identify Preclinical Alzheimer Disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. JAMA Neurology 2025-11-01

Participants had a mean (SD) age of 66.9 (9.9) years; 971 (33.3%) were Aβ positive by either CSF or PET, 1667 (57.2%) were women, and 1108 (38.1%) carried at least 1 APOE ε4 allele. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 2,916 Evidence: high

Common Genetic Variation Indicates Separate Causes for Periventricular and Deep White Matter Hyperintensities

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Stroke 2020-06-10

Periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH; PVWMH) and deep WMH (DWMH) are regional classifications of WMH and reflect proposed differences in cause. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,654 Evidence: high

Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Nature communications 2020-12-08

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. 1 key finding →

Evidence: moderate

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

Early tau deposition was elevated in women compared with men in individuals on the Alzheimer disease trajectory. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 89 Evidence: low

However, the extent to which increasing age, Aβ, and ε4 are associated with memory decline remains unclear, and the age at which memory decline begins for Aβ-positive ε4 carriers and noncarriers has not been determined. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,583 Evidence: moderate

Estimates of AD disease duration become more accurate if age, sex, setting, APOE, and cerebrospinal fluid tau are taken into account. 2 key findings →

Participants: 3,268 Evidence: low

Apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 is the single most important genetic risk factor for cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease (AD), while lifestyle factors such as smoking, drinking, diet, and physical activity also have impact on cognition. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

Disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer's disease (AD) are likely to be most beneficial when initiated in the presymptomatic phase. 2 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 567 Evidence: moderate

Due to trisomy of chromosome 21 and the resultant extra copy of the amyloid precursor protein gene, nearly all adults with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease pathology by the age of 40 years and are at high risk for dementia given their increased life expectancy compared with adults with Down syndrome in the past. 1 key finding →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 41 Evidence: moderate

The pattern of atrophy in familial Alzheimer disease: volumetric MRI results from the DIAN study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 59 out of 100. Neurology 2013-09-18

Atrophy in FAD is observed early, both in areas commonly associated with sporadic Alzheimer disease and also in the putamen and thalamus, 2 regions associated with early amyloid deposition in FAD mutation carriers. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 192 Evidence: low

Although Aβ did not differ by sex, cognitive decline was greater in females with higher Aβ. 3 key findings →

Participants: 755 Evidence: low

Reduction in hippocampal and amygdala volume measured via structural magnetic resonance imaging is an early marker of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →

Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate

The extent to which the pathophysiology of autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease corresponds to the pathophysiology of 'sporadic' late onset Alzheimer's disease is unknown, thus limiting the extrapolation of study findings and clinical trial results in autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease to late onset Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →

Participants: 559 Evidence: low

Cardiovascular health, genetic risk, and risk of dementia in the Framingham Heart Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 56 out of 100. Neurology 2020-07-20

We categorized CVH on the basis of the American Heart Association Ideal CVH Index and genetic risk through a genetic risk score (GRS) of common genetic variants and the APOE ε4 genotype in 1,211 Framingham Heart Study (FHS) offspring cohort participants. 4 key findings →

Evidence: moderate

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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. 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
  • 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