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 large cohort of cognitively unimpaired individuals enrolled in a Phase 3 clinical trial and companion observational study, these findings confirm that higher baseline levels of amyloid and tau markers are associated with increased rates of cognitive decline and progression to functional impairment. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 583
Evidence: high
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Furthermore, plasma p-tau231 was significantly increased in amyloid-β PET quartiles 2-4, whereas CSF p-tau217 and plasma p-tau181 increased only at quartiles 3-4 and 4, respectively. 2 key findings →
Participants: 588
Evidence: moderate
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74/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 74 out of 100.
·
Neurology
·
2016-09-30
Plasma tau partly reflects AD pathology, but the overlap between normal aging and AD is large, especially in patients without dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 179
Evidence: moderate
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Smoothing splines demonstrated that earliest plasma p-tau181 changes occurred even before amyloid-β markers reached abnormal levels, with greater rates of change correlating with increased amyloid-β pathology. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort
Participants: 1,067
Evidence: moderate
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In two randomized crossover studies involving 48 healthy, cognitively normal adults (registered on ClinicalTrials.gov), researchers measured brain and blood markers after normal sleep versus sleep deprivation. 4 key findings →
Design: RCT
Participants: 48
Evidence: moderate
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In this prospective cohort study, we included adults aged 40 years or older with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, or dementia, based on cognitive test results and clinical assessments, consecutively recruited at two memory clinics in Sweden, as part of the Swedish BioFINDER-2 study. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 572
Evidence: high
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72/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100.
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JAMA Neurology
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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
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72/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100.
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JAMA neurology
·
2019-05-01
Among the 1453 participants in the Framingham dementia study sample, the mean (SD) age was 75 (7) years; 792 (54.5%) were female. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,453
Evidence: moderate
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72/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100.
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JAMA neurology
·
2022-02-01
Of 343 participants, the mean (SD) age was 72.56 (7.24) years, and 157 (51.1%) were female. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 343
Evidence: moderate
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72/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100.
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JAMA neurology
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2026-01-01
These findings demonstrate that plasma p-tau217 can reliably detect AD pathology in the preclinical stage. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review
Participants: 7,834
Evidence: high
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We found that the mass spectrometry-based p-tau217 (p-tau217WashU) exhibited significantly better performance than all other plasma p-tau biomarkers when detecting abnormal Aβ status [area under curve (AUC) = 0.947; Pdiff 0.09), but higher compared with AUC of p-tau231UGOT, p-tau181Lilly, p-tau181UGOT, p-tau181Fuji and p-tau181Splex (AUCrange 0.642-0.813; Pdiff ≤ 0.029). 5 key findings →
Participants: 135
Evidence: low
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As tau aggregation pathology correlates with clinical dementia in Alzheimer's disease (AD), a tau aggregation inhibitor (TAI) could have therapeutic utility. 4 key findings →
Participants: 135
Evidence: high
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Whilst cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and positron emission tomography (PET) biomarkers for amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau pathologies are accurate for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), their broad implementation in clinical and trial settings are restricted by high cost and limited accessibility. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 1,000
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
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Nature Medicine
·
2023-04-24
Tau plays a key role in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology, and accumulating evidence suggests that lowering tau may reduce this pathology. 1 key finding →
Design: phase-1-trial
Participants: 46
Evidence: early
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Plasma p-tau217/Aβ42 has high performance in detecting cerebral AD pathologies, thus offering a promising tool for clinical diagnosis and community screening of AD. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 512
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
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JAMA neurology
·
2023-02-01
For all 4 phosphorylation sites assessed in CSF, p-tau was significantly more closely associated with amyloid-PET values than tau-PET values (p-tau181 difference, 13%; 95% CI, 3%-22%; P = .006; p-tau217 difference, 11%; 95% CI, 3%-20%; P = .003; p-tau231 difference, 15%; 95% CI, 5%-22%; P Conclusions and relevance Results of this cross-sectional study of 2 observational cohorts suggest that the p-tau abnormality as an early event in AD pathogenesis was associated with amyloid-β accumulation and highlights the need for careful interpretation of p-tau biomarkers in the context of the amyloid/tau/neurodegeneration, or A/T/(N), framework. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 609
Evidence: moderate
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These two conclusions support a dynamic biomarker model in which Alzheimer's disease is characterized first by the appearance of amyloidosis and later by tauopathy, with tauopathy being the proteinopathy associated with clinical symptoms. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 1,343
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
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JAMA neurology
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2018-08-01
After correcting for multiple comparisons using the Bonferroni procedure, we observed a statistically significant interaction between APOE-ε4 and sex on CSF total tau (β = 0.41; 95% CI, 0.27-0.55; P Conclusions and relevance We provide robust evidence of a stronger association between APOE-ε4 and CSF tau levels among women compared with men across multiple independent data sets. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,798
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
Neurology
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2023-09-01
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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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2021-05-24
A combination of plasma phospho-tau (P-tau) and other accessible biomarkers might provide accurate prediction about the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 340
Evidence: low
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We found that accelerated increase in tau-PET signal was observed in amyloid-β-positive mild cognitive impairment (3.0 ± 5.3%) and Alzheimer's disease dementia (2.9 ± 5.7%), respectively, when compared to either amyloid-β-negative cognitively unimpaired (0.4 ± 2.7%), amyloid-β-negative mild cognitive impairment (-0.4 ± 2.3%) or amyloid-β-positive cognitively unimpaired (1.2 ± 2.8%). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 157
Evidence: moderate
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70/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2026-02-19
Predicting not just if, but also when, cognitively unimpaired individuals are likely to develop onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptoms would be useful to clinical trials and, eventually, clinical practice. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 603
Evidence: moderate
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Plasma p-tau217 is a prognostic marker for identifying individuals who will develop cognitive impairment within ten years. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 215
Evidence: moderate
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70/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100.
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Neurology
·
2025-05-15
In DDI (n = 431), participants were classified as CN A-/T- (n = 169), A+/T- (CN = 26, MCI = 24), A+/T+ (CN = 40, MCI = 105), and A-/T+ (CN = 34, MCI = 33), with a mean age of 64.1 years and 55.9% female. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 431
Evidence: moderate
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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.