Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a public health priority for the 21st century. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 74,046 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
30,580 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
With no effective treatments for cognitive decline or dementia, improving the evidence base for modifiable risk factors is a research priority. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 48,522 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Points• UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40-69 years when recruited in 2006-2010.• The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.• Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.• UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Participants: 500,000 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We also determined the extent to which sex, educational attainment, and apolipoprotein E ε4 allele (APOE*4) carrier status were associated with decline. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 42,170 Evidence: moderate
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Higher adherence to a MedDiet was associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic risk, underlining the importance of diet in dementia prevention interventions. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 60,298 Evidence: moderate
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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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We analyzed 1,240 MRIs from 473 patients (age: 69.2 ± 7.4 [range: 49-87]; 32.8% women). 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,240 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
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We identified 4 novel genetic loci that implicate inflammatory and glial proliferative pathways in the development of WMH in addition to previously proposed ischemic mechanisms. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 17 Evidence: high
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Delirium is an acute change in cognition, common in hospitalized older adults, and associated with high healthcare and human cost; however, delirium's genetic and proteomic background remains poorly understood. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,059,130 Evidence: high
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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
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The genetic variant rs72824905-G (minor allele) in the PLCG2 gene was previously associated with a reduced Alzheimer's disease risk (AD). 4 key findings →
Participants: 53,627 Evidence: low
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Apolipoprotein (APOE) e4 genotype is an accepted risk factor for accelerated cognitive aging and dementia, though its neurostructural substrates are unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 8,395 Evidence: moderate
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The RNA-binding protein TDP-43 regulates RNA metabolism at multiple levels, including transcription, RNA splicing, and mRNA stability. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Rare variants in TREM2 cause susceptibility to late-onset Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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The apolipoprotein E (APOE)ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset AD and is associated with aberrant cerebrospinal fluid levels (CSF) of total tau (t-tau), phosphorylated tau (p-tau), and amyloid-β (Aβ). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Carriers of the e4 allele may be more vulnerable to conditions that are independent risk factors for cognitive decline, such as cardiometabolic diseases. 4 key findings →
Participants: 111,739 Evidence: low
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Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is associated with apolipoprotein E (APOE gene, apoE protein) polymorphism: current evidence suggests that the epsilon4 allele is a risk factor for the development of CAA and the epsilon2 allele predisposes to hemorrhage. 3 key findings →
Participants: 62 Evidence: low
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These data are evidence of a gene x environment interaction for cognitive aging. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
45/100
Both ATH and AD involve inflammation, macrophage infiltration, and occlusion of the vasculature. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is frequently comorbid with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and brain endothelial cells (BECs) express genes associated with AD genetic risk. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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The genetic architecture of sporadic Early-Onset Alzheimer Disease (sEOAD, onset ≤65 years) remains largely unknown. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) and dementia frequently co-occur, yet the biological mechanisms underlying this comorbidity remain incompletely understood. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cellular mechanisms in early Alzheimers disease (AD) remain poorly understood despite generation of extensive observational multiomic data. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 30,580 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 30,580 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (64.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.6%), 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.
1,037 records (3.4% 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 →
Newest studies, as a dated timeline → Atom feed Where this research is being discussed: events