The total cost of disorders of the brain was estimated at €798 billion in 2010. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
31,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The number of years of formal education completed by individuals is positively correlated with their cognitive function throughout adulthood and predicts lower risk of dementia late in life. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
71/100
Both overweight and obesity at midlife independently increase the risk of dementia, AD, and VaD. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 350 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increased cerebrospinal fluid neurofilament light (NfL) is a recognized biomarker for neurodegeneration that can also be assessed in blood. 1 key finding →
Participants: 805 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study found that CSF-based estimates using adjusted data-driven cutoffs were up to 10% higher than PET-based estimates in people without dementia, whereas the results were similar among people with dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 97 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The diverse leukocyte infiltrate in atherosclerotic mouse aortas was recently analyzed in 9 single-cell RNA sequencing and 2 mass cytometry studies. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The modern era of drug development for Alzheimer's disease began with the proposal of the cholinergic hypothesis of memory impairment and the 1984 research criteria for Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These data support the use of cNfL as a biomarker of neuroaxonal damage and indicate that age-specific and sex-specific (and in some cases disease-specific) reference values may be needed. 4 key findings →
Participants: 2,795 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Ageing of the population, together with population growth, has brought along an ample increase in the number of older individuals living with dementia and disabilities. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
69/100
If the associations we observed are causal, then air pollution from traffic might be an important risk factor for vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 1,806 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
69/100
For early detection of Alzheimer's disease, it is important to find biomarkers with predictive value for disease progression and clinical manifestations, such as cognitive decline. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 282 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
At baseline, 2,279 dementia-free participants with available blood samples were included (median age 72 (interquartile range, 61-81) years; 62% female). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 2,279 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In a community-based cohort of 70-year olds, P-NfL was associated with both prevalent and incident CKD, while CSF and/or imaging measures did not differ by CKD status. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 744 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The trial occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. 5 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 106 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
67/100
Alzheimer's disease and coronary artery disease are common late-life chronic conditions and share multiple risk factors, including the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele. 4 key findings →
Design: RCT Participants: 1,177 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Neurofilament proteins have been validated as specific body fluid biomarkers of neuro-axonal injury. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In subjects with MCI and evidence of amyloid pathology, the injury markers CSF t-tau and p-tau and hippocampal atrophy can predict further cognitive decline. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 110 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this genetic association study, a novel variant associated with AD was identified: R251G always coinherited with ε4 on the APOE gene, which mitigates the ε4-associated AD risk. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 37 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The heterogeneity of neurodegenerative diseases is a key confound to disease understanding and treatment development, as study cohorts typically include multiple phenotypes on distinct disease trajectories. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Researchers performed a genome-wide association study of clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease and disease-by-proxy. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
NPTs emerge as a useful, versatile and potentially cost-effective approach to improve outcomes and QoL in ADRD for both the PWD and CG. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The construct of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has evolved over the past 10 years since the publication of the new MCI definition at the Key Symposium in 2003, but the core criteria have remained unchanged. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The 52 baseline participants comprised autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease mutation carriers (n = 11; 49.6 ± 10.3 years old) and non-carriers (n = 16; 51.1 ± 14.2 years old; 10 male), and patients with sporadic mild cognitive impairment (n = 17; 61.9 ± 6.4 years old; nine male) and sporadic Alzheimer's disease (n = 8; 63.0 ± 6.5 years old; five male); for confidentiality reasons, the gender of mutation carriers is not revealed. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We included 18740 patients (10 205 women [54.5%]; mean [SD] age, 78.2[7.4] years), of which 4271 (22.8%) received at least one prescription for an antidepressant. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 18,740 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
66/100
Researchers conducted a large, two-stage meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in individuals of European ancestry.
Evidence: low
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.
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 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