27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Mean age was 83.5 (SD, 8.5) years in cohort 1, 69.1 (SD, 10.3) years in cohort 2, and 35.8 (SD, 10.7) years in cohort 3; 38% were women in cohort 1, 51% in cohort 2, and 57% in cohort 3. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 301 Evidence: moderate
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An antecedent rise in Aβ was associated with subsequent changes in tau (1.07 flortaucipir standardized uptake value ratios [SUVr]/PiB-SUVr; 95% CI, 0.13-3.46; P = .02). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 279 Evidence: moderate
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Mounting evidence in adults without AD indicates that females exhibit higher tau deposition than age-matched males, particularly in the setting of elevated β-amyloid (Aβ), but the evidence for sex differences in tau accumulation rates is inconclusive. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,376 Evidence: high
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A major unanswered question in the dementia field is whether cognitively unimpaired individuals who harbor both Alzheimer's disease neuropathological hallmarks (that is, amyloid-β plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles) can preserve their cognition over time or are destined to decline. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,325 Evidence: low
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Among the 6514 participants (mean age, 69.5 years; 50.5% female), median follow-up time ranged from 1.5 to 4.0 years. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,514 Evidence: moderate
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AUC for amyloid and tau PET provide expert recommendations for clinical use of these technologies in the evolving landscape of diagnostics and therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic-review Evidence: moderate
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In a proportion of patients, dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) copathology, which is linked to accelerated cognitive decline and more extensive cortical atrophy. 5 key findings →
Participants: 45 Evidence: high
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Levels of plasma p-tau217 increased significantly in Aβ+ participants before showing significant deceleration (χ2 = 21.7; P Conclusions and relevance This study found that tau PET is valuable for both prognostic and real-time tracking of disease progression. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,707 Evidence: moderate
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Advances in molecular positron emission tomography (PET) have enabled anatomic tracking of brain pathology in longitudinal studies of normal aging and dementia, including assessment of the central model of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis, according to which TAU pathology begins focally but expands catastrophically under the influence of amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology to mediate neurodegeneration and cognitive decline. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 104 Evidence: moderate
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These findings add to growing evidence that women have a differential tau response to Aβ that may emerge at the point of p-tau secretion. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,292 Evidence: moderate
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Baseline plasma VEGFA and PGF each showed a significant interaction with amyloid burden on prospective cognitive decline. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 317 Evidence: moderate
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Higher tau levels are associated with the fastest decline in everyday functioning in the presence of elevated amyloid, and those accumulating more tau show a faster decline in everyday functioning. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 434 Evidence: high
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Of 386 participants, 199 (52%) were female, and the mean (SD) age was 68 (8) years. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 113 Evidence: moderate
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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
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Among 580 participants (PREVENT-AD, 128; HABS, 153; AIBL, 48; Knight ADRC, 251), mean (SD) age ranged from 67 (5) to 76 (6) years across cohorts, with between 55% (137/251) and 74% (95/128) female participants. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 580 Evidence: moderate
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Among 300 participants with DS and a control group of 37 non-DS siblings, mean (SD) age was 45.0 (10.1) years, and 167 (49.6%) were men. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 300 Evidence: low
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The amyloid/tau/neurodegeneration (A/T/N) framework uses cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of total tau (tTau) as a marker of neurodegeneration and CSF levels of phosphorylated tau 181 (pTau181) as a marker of tau tangles. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 465 Evidence: moderate
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This study suggests that early tau deposition may follow multiple trajectories during preclinical AD and may involve several cortical regions. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 447 Evidence: moderate
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The spread of protein aggregates during disease progression is a common theme underlying many neurodegenerative diseases. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Researchers quantified the phosphorylation state at multiple sites of the tau protein in cerebrospinal fluid markers across four decades of disease progression in dominantly inherited Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
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Of 40 included participants (mean [SD] age at death, 88 [8] years; 21 [52%] male), 19 had early-stage dementia with Braak stages III to IV, 13 had resilient brains with similar Braak stages III to IV, and 8 had no dementia (Braak stages 0-II). 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 40 Evidence: low
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We recommend a new term, "primary age-related tauopathy" (PART), to describe a pathology that is commonly observed in the brains of aged individuals. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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The following 2 regions for tau burden were identified: the entorhinal cortex, which exhibits early signs of tauopathy, and the inferior temporal region, which is more closely associated with AD-related pathologic mechanisms. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 133 Evidence: low
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Hereditary frontotemporal dementia associated with mutations in the microtubule-associated protein tau gene (MAPT) is a protean disorder. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
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These findings suggest that (18)F T807 PET could have value as a biomarker that reflects both the progression of AD tauopathy and the emergence of clinical impairment. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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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 →