27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
White matter hyperintensities are frequent on neuroimaging of older people and are a key feature of cerebral small vessel disease. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,006 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH; PVWMH) and deep WMH (DWMH) are regional classifications of WMH and reflect proposed differences in cause. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 26,654 Evidence: high
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White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. 1 key finding →
Evidence: moderate
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We identified 4 novel genetic loci that implicate inflammatory and glial proliferative pathways in the development of WMH in addition to previously proposed ischemic mechanisms. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 17 Evidence: high
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However, some individuals have subtle symptoms associated with acute MRI lesions. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 21 Evidence: high
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One hundred ninety-eight of 229 participants had WMH volumes available at both time-points. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 229 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral "microvascular" disease occurs in lacunar stroke, leukoaraiosis, vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,953 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
An international working group from the Centres of Excellence in Neurodegeneration completed a structured process to develop definitions and imaging standards for markers and consequences of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD). 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Higher levels of VRFs were associated with poorer brain health across grey and white matter macrostructure and microstructure. 5 key findings →
Participants: 9,722 Evidence: low
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Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are increasingly recognised neuroimaging findings in individuals with cerebrovascular disease and dementia, and in normal ageing. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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Delirium is a profound neuropsychiatric disturbance precipitated by acute illness. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 465 Evidence: moderate
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Three survey rounds included 49 to 54 participants that agreed on VasCog-2 diagnostic criteria for preclinical, mild, and major dementia levels of vascular cognitive impairment (under the overarching term VCID). 5 key findings →
Participants: 49 Evidence: low
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Small vessel disease is a disorder of cerebral microvessels that causes white matter hyperintensities and several other common abnormalities (eg, recent small subcortical infarcts and lacunes) seen on brain imaging. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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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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Apolipoprotein (APOE) e4 genotype is an accepted risk factor for accelerated cognitive aging and dementia, though its neurostructural substrates are unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 8,395 Evidence: moderate
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We recruited 210 participants; 205 (66.8% male; aged 66.4±11.1 years) had useable data. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 210 Evidence: moderate
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'Covert' cerebral small vessel disease (ccSVD) is common on neuroimaging in persons without overt neurological manifestations, and increases the risk of future stroke, cognitive impairment, dependency, and death. 3 key findings →
Evidence: high
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Perivascular spaces include a variety of passageways around arterioles, capillaries and venules in the brain, along which a range of substances can move. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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In linear mixed models, vascular endothelial growth factor was significantly associated with incident DWI-positive lesions over 1 year. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 181 Evidence: moderate
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Cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) is a leading cause of stroke and dementia with no specific treatment, of which molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. 2 key findings →
Participants: 40,000 Evidence: low
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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia, characterized by the accumulation of amyloid-beta (Aβ) and neurofibrillary tangles. 4 key findings →
Participants: 16 Evidence: low
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Cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) is a very common neurological disease in older people. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mean age was 83.5 years (delirium 78.7 vs non-delirium 88.4); 13/20 were female; 17/20 had premorbid cognitive decline/impairment or dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Microglia are resident macrophages of the central nervous system that have key functions in its development, homeostasis and response to damage and infection. 4 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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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.
1,034 records (3.7% 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 →