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Research

27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.

Find studies

Showing 1–25 of 34 studies in Brain scans and imaging (page 1 of 2) · 27,380 in the whole library · How the 0–100 score works

Showing 34 studies tagged precursor — clear

Browse by subject, author or institution

Each number is how many studies that link shows, with your other filters kept.

Other subjects

Authors

Names as each record prints them; the same person can appear under two spellings.

Institutions

From OpenAlex; 12,859 studies have no institution on record and are not counted here.

What “Brain scans and imaging” covers

Brain scans and imaging — MRI, PET and other scans: what they show, how early, and how reliably.

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Etiology of White Matter Hyperintensities in Autosomal Dominant and Sporadic Alzheimer Disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2023-12-01

Data from 3960 MRI sessions among 1141 participants were included: 252 pathogenic variant carriers from DIAN (mean [SD] age, 38.4 [11.2] years; 137 [54%] female), 571 older adults from ADNI (mean [SD] age, 72.8 [7.3] years; 274 [48%] female), and 318 older adults from HABS (mean [SD] age, 72.4 [7.6] years; 194 [61%] female). 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 1,141 Evidence: moderate

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Association of β-Amyloid and Apolipoprotein E ε4 With Memory Decline in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2018-04-01

However, the extent to which increasing age, Aβ, and ε4 are associated with memory decline remains unclear, and the age at which memory decline begins for Aβ-positive ε4 carriers and noncarriers has not been determined. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,583 Evidence: moderate

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Reduced lean mass in early Alzheimer disease and its association with brain atrophy

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Archives of neurology 2010-04-01

Lean mass was reduced in persons with early AD compared with controls without dementia (F = 7.73; P = .006) after controlling for sex. 2 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 70 Evidence: moderate

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Association of Microglial Activation With Spontaneous ARIA-E and CSF Levels of Anti-Aβ Autoantibodies

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 60 out of 100. Neurology 2022-08-08

ARIA-E can also occur spontaneously in cerebral amyloid angiopathy-related inflammation (CAA-ri), a rare autoimmune encephalopathy associated with increased CSF levels of anti-Aβ autoantibodies. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Apolipoprotein E ε4 and age effects on florbetapir positron emission tomography in healthy aging and Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 56 out of 100. Neurobiology of aging 2012-05-24

Cerebral amyloid deposition is associated with APOE4 carrier status in older healthy control subjects and symptomatic AD patients, and increases with age in older cognitively normal individuals. 3 key findings →

Participants: 245 Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription

Beta-amyloid burden in the temporal neocortex is related to hippocampal atrophy in elderly subjects without dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 55 out of 100. Neurology 2010-01-01

The strong correlation between hippocampal atrophy and beta-amyloid (Abeta) burden in the Pittsburgh compound B-positive healthy control group suggests that Abeta deposition in the inferior temporal neocortex is related to hippocampal synaptic and neuronal degeneration. 3 key findings →

Participants: 32 Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription

Cortical microstructural correlates of astrocytosis in autosomal-dominant Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 54 out of 100. Neurology 2020-04-14

Our proof-of-concept study is the first to show that microstructural and macrostructural changes can reflect underlying neuroinflammatory mechanisms in early stages of Alzheimer disease (AD). 2 key findings →

Participants: 31 Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Resting metabolic connectivity in prodromal Alzheimer's disease. A European Alzheimer Disease Consortium (EADC) project

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 52 out of 100. Neurobiology of aging 2012-02-23

We explored resting-state metabolic connectivity in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (pAD) patients and in healthy controls (CTR), through a voxel-wise interregional correlation analysis of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET) by means of statistical parametric mapping. 1 key finding →

Participants: 36 Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription

Increased localization of APP-C99 in mitochondria-associated ER membranes causes mitochondrial dysfunction in Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 51 out of 100. The EMBO journal 2017-10-10

In the amyloidogenic pathway associated with Alzheimer disease (AD), the amyloid precursor protein (APP) is cleaved by β-secretase to generate a 99-aa C-terminal fragment (C99) that is then cleaved by γ-secretase to generate the β-amyloid (Aβ) found in senile plaques. 2 key findings →

Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Activity dependent degeneration explains hub vulnerability in Alzheimer's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 50 out of 100. PLoS computational biology 2012-08-16

Brain connectivity studies have revealed that highly connected 'hub' regions are particularly vulnerable to Alzheimer pathology: they show marked amyloid-β deposition at an early stage. 3 key findings →

Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Accelerated cortical atrophy in cognitively normal elderly with high β-amyloid deposition

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 48 out of 100. Neurology 2012-02-01

Our findings show that the presence of Aβ in the brain, known to occur in about one-third of asymptomatic elderly individuals, is actually a pathologic state associated with accelerated atrophy. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription

δ-Catenin is genetically and biologically associated with cortical cataract and future Alzheimer-related structural and functional brain changes

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 46 out of 100. PloS one 2012-09-11

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that specific subtypes of age-related cataract (ARC) and Alzheimer disease (AD) are related etiologically. 5 key findings →

Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Metabolic networks underlying cognitive reserve in prodromal Alzheimer disease: a European Alzheimer disease consortium project

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 45 out of 100. Journal of nuclear medicine : official publication, Society of Nuclear Medicine 2013-04-16

The clusters of significant depression and compensation were further used as volumetric regions of interest (ROIs) in a brain interregional correlation analysis in each prodromal AD subgroup to explore metabolic connectivity. 3 key findings →

Evidence: low

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

Cholinergic basal forebrain atrophy accelerates cognitive decline via cortical thinning: The moderating role of amyloid-β pathology in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 45 out of 100. The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer s Disease 2025-07-29

Progressive cortical thinning in multiple cognition-related regions was significantly associated with cBF atrophy. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text

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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 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.

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 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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed