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In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

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.

Genome-wide association studies of cerebral white matter lesion burden: the CHARGE consortium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2011-06-01

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

Common Genetic Variation Indicates Separate Causes for Periventricular and Deep White Matter Hyperintensities

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. Stroke 2020-06-10

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

Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100. Nature communications 2020-12-08

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

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

A total of 16 084 European adults from 8 cohort studies (mean age range, 56.9±12.3-82.1±4.2 years) of the European Eye Epidemiology (E3) consortium. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 16 Evidence: high

Plasma amyloid-β (Aβ) levels are increasingly studied as a potential, accessible marker of cognitive impairment and dementia. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,201 Evidence: high

Hypertension and cerebral white matter lesions in a prospective cohort study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 63 out of 100. Brain : a journal of neurology 2002-04-01

White matter lesions are frequently found on cerebral MRI scans of elderly people and are thought to be important in the pathogenesis of dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,077 Evidence: low

Homocysteine, silent brain infarcts, and white matter lesions: The Rotterdam Scan Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Annals of neurology 2002-03-01

Silent brain infarcts and white matter lesions are frequently seen on magnetic resonance imaging in healthy elderly people and both are associated with an increased risk of stroke and dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,077 Evidence: low

Better diet quality relates to larger brain tissue volumes: The Rotterdam Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Neurology 2018-05-16

From the population-based Rotterdam Study, 4,447 participants underwent dietary assessment and brain MRI scanning between 2005 and 2015. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 4,447 Evidence: moderate

The prevalence and the degree of cerebral white matter lesions increased with age. 2 key findings →

Participants: 1,077 Evidence: low

Cerebral white matter lesions are frequently observed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in elderly people and are associated with stroke and dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 1,625 Evidence: low

Cerebral microbleeds are associated with worse cognitive function: the Rotterdam Scan Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 58 out of 100. Neurology 2012-01-18

Cerebral microbleeds are frequently found in the general elderly population and may reflect underlying vascular disease, but their role in cognitive function is unknown. 4 key findings →

Participants: 3,979 Evidence: low

Unrecognized myocardial infarction in relation to risk of dementia and cerebral small vessel disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 57 out of 100. Stroke 2008-03-06

Men, but not women, with unrecognized myocardial infarction (MI) have an increased risk of cardiac events and stroke compared with those without MI or with recognized MI. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 613 Evidence: moderate

Cortical superficial siderosis describes a distinct pattern of blood-breakdown product deposition limited to cortical sulci over the convexities of the cerebral hemispheres, sparing the brainstem, cerebellum and spinal cord. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Among 2935 patients (50.4% women; mean age=72.2 years; 19.8% subjective cognitive impairment, 39.8% mild cognitive impairment, and 40.4% dementia), larger WMH volume within projection fibres (B=0.24, SE=0.10, p=0.013) was associated with greater apathy. 5 key findings →

Participants: 2,935 Evidence: low

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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