27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The APOE ε4 allele remains the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer's disease and the APOE ε2 allele the strongest genetic protective factor after multiple large scale genome-wide association studies and genome-wide association meta-analyses. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Lewy body diseases (LBD), and the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia (ALS-FTD) spectrum are defined by the accumulation of specific misfolded protein aggregates. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 2,600 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This double-blind randomized controlled trial of vitamin therapy demonstrates a strong correlation between serum tHcy and plasma Abeta40 concentrations in subjects with ischemic stroke. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 150 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The core Alzheimer's disease (AD) cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers; amyloid-β (Aß), total tau (t-tau), and phosphorylated tau (p-tau181), are strong indicators of the presence of AD pathology, but do not correlate well with disease progression, and can be difficult to implement in longitudinal studies where repeat biofluid sampling is required. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 54 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
AD-signature cortical thinning in CN-AD converters in both samples was remarkably similar, about 0.2 mm (p 1). 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Immunization against amyloid-beta has been suggested as a possible preventive or therapeutic treatment for Alzheimer's disease. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 365 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A consensus panel from the United States and Europe was convened recently to update and revise the 1997 consensus guidelines for the neuropathologic evaluation of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other diseases of brain that are common in the elderly. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
From a longitudinal study of normal (Clinical Dementia Rating [CDR] = 0; n = 77) and mildly impaired (CDR = 0.5; n = 167) participants with 5 or more annual clinical assessments, baseline level of cognitive impairment in daily life was graded using CDR sum of boxes (CDR-SB) and level of cognitive performance impairment was graded using neuropsychological test scores. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 77 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Although it is clear that astrocytes and microglia cluster around dense-core amyloid plaques in Alzheimer disease (AD), whether they are primarily attracted to amyloid deposits or are just reacting to plaque-associated neuritic damage remains elusive. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association charged a workgroup with the task of revising the 1984 criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The entorhinal cortex (EC) plays a crucial role as a gateway connecting the neocortex and the hippocampal formation. 4 key findings →
Participants: 20 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
APOE genotyping does not provide sufficient sensitivity or specificity to be used alone as a diagnostic test for Alzheimer's disease, but when used in combination with clinical criteria, it improves the specificity of the diagnosis. 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,188 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
To assess the relationship between dementia, neuronal loss, and neuropathological findings in Alzheimer's disease (AD), we counted the number of neurons, senile plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles in a high-order association cortex. 1 key finding →
Participants: 34 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer disease (AD) include "positive" lesions such as amyloid plaques and cerebral amyloid angiopathy, neurofibrillary tangles, and glial responses, and "negative" lesions such as neuronal and synaptic loss. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These data support distinct processes in the initiation and progression of AD pathology within the temporal cortex: Deposition of Abeta reaches a "ceiling" early in the disease process, whereas NFT formation, synaptic loss, and gliosis continue throughout the course of the illness. 1 key finding →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Senile plaques are a prominent pathological feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but little is understood about the association of glial cells with plaques or about the dynamics of glial responses through the disease course. 2 key findings →
Participants: 91 Evidence: low
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Studies of post-mortem tissue have shown that the location of fibrillar tau deposits, called neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), matches closely with regions of massive neuronal death, severe cytological abnormalities, and markers of caspase activation and apoptosis, leading to the idea that tangles cause neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease and tau-related frontotemporal dementia. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
From a total sample of 559 older adults from the Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease Research Center longitudinal cohort, 454 were included in the primary analysis: 283 with clinically normal cognition (CN), 115 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 56 with subjective cognitive concerns (SCC) but no objective impairment, a proposed transitional group between CN and MCI. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Although senile plaques focally disrupt neuronal health, the functional response of astrocytes to Alzheimer's disease pathology is unknown. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Even when adjusted for age at onset, symptom duration, and other demographic variables, APOEε2 is associated with milder AD pathology and less severe antemortem cognitive impairment compared to APOEε3 and ε4 alleles, suggesting a relative neuroprotective effect of APOEε2 in AD. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In all 6 patients (3 women and 3 men; mean age 61.8 years), the underlying clinical phenotype was associated with the regional distribution of the [18F]AV-1451 signal. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Endocytosis is critical to the function and fate of molecules important to Alzheimer's disease (AD) etiology, including the beta protein precursor (betaPP), amyloid beta (Abeta) peptide, and apolipoprotein E (ApoE). 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The symptoms of Alzheimer disease reflect a loss of neural circuit integrity in the brain, but neurons do not work in isolation. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
For the past three decades, apolipoprotein E (APOE) has been known as the single greatest genetic modulator of sporadic Alzheimer disease (AD) risk, influencing both the average age of onset and the lifetime risk of developing AD. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These results demonstrate that temporoparietal regions show differential rates of atrophy on MRI during prodromal Alzheimer disease (AD). 5 key findings →
Participants: 66 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 →