27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
MRI features of cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD), i.e. white matter hyperintensities, lacunes, microbleeds, perivascular spaces, and cerebral atrophy, may be associated with clinical events, but the strength of these associations remains unclear. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 16,458 Evidence: high
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This large GWAS of WMH burden in community-based cohorts of individuals of European descent identifies a novel locus on chromosome 17. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,024 Evidence: high
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Arterial stiffness was associated with Aβ plaque deposition in the brain, independent of BP and APOE ε4 allele. 5 key findings →
Participants: 91 Evidence: moderate
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Failure to consider vascular cognitive impairment without dementia underestimates the prevalence of impairment and the risk for adverse outcomes associated with vascular cognitive impairment. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 9,008 Evidence: moderate
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Mediation analyses proposed that visceral obesity contributes to deep white matter lesions through increases in proinflammatory cytokines, suggesting a pathomechanistic link. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,825 Evidence: moderate
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White matter hyperintensities are associated with increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline. 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,367 Evidence: low
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Vascular endothelial growth factor was associated with baseline hippocampal volume (t277 = 2.62; P = .009), longitudinal hippocampal atrophy (t858 = 2.48; P = .01), and longitudinal decline in memory (t1629 = 4.09; P Conclusions and relevance Elevated cerebrospinal fluid VEGF was associated with more optimal brain aging in vivo. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 90 Evidence: moderate
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The term cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) describes a range of neuroimaging, pathological, and associated clinical features. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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Ischemic vascular dementia (IVD) is a relatively uncommon entity, in the course of which multiple ischemic brain lesions result in progressive cognitive and memory impairment. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 20 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebrovascular disease is the second most common cause of acquired cognitive impairment and dementia and contributes to cognitive decline in the neurodegenerative dementias. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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A staging system based on this conceptual model of cerebrovascular pathology could enable the neuropathologic quantification of the cerebrovascular burden in dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 26 Evidence: low
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Older age and vascular disease, particularly among African Americans, are associated with increased brain atrophy and WMH burden. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 769 Evidence: moderate
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Age-related white matter changes (ARWMC) on brain MRI have been associated with cognitive, motor, mood and urinary disturbances. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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Exposure to ambient air pollution is a well-established determinant of health and disease. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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The number of patients surviving with congenital heart disease (CHD) has soared over the last 3 decades. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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Increased total and periventricular (PV) white matter hyperintensity (WMH) burden and progression of PV WMH burden are associated with decreased gait performance over time, while progression of subcortical WMH volume is associated with memory decline in cognitively intact elderly. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Diabetes is associated with cognitive dysfunction and an increased risk of dementia. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Understanding the relationship between infection and stroke has taken on new urgency in the era of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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The World Health Organization reports that 47.5 million people are affected by dementia worldwide. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Cerebral microbleeds (microbleeds) are small, punctuate hypointense lesions seen in T2* Gradient-Recall Echo (GRE) and Susceptibility-Weighted (SWI) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sequences, corresponding to areas of hemosiderin breakdown products from prior microscopic hemorrhages. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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In this group of older adults free from neurodegenerative diseases, a greater variability of step length was associated with greater burden of subclinical brain vascular abnormalities as defined by MRI. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
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Sepsis is a major cause of death in intensive care units worldwide. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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Encouragingly, aspects of secondary prevention were identified that may be protective in reducing the incidence of cognitive impairment post-stroke. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disorders are the main cause of death and permanent disability worldwide. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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White matter hyperintensities (WMH), commonly found on T2-weighted FLAIR brain MR images in the elderly, are associated with a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and late-life depression. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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 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.
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 →