27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Concentrations of plasma p-tau181 were compared with established CSF and PET biomarkers and longitudinal measurements using Spearman correlation, area under the curve (AUC), and linear regression analyses. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,131 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The neuropathological confirmation of amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) remains the gold standard for a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 115 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This study suggests that plasma GFAP is a sensitive biomarker for detecting and tracking reactive astrogliosis and Aβ pathology even among individuals in the early stages of AD. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 300 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Exclusion criteria included any significant neurologic disorder other than suspected AD; presence of infection, infarction, or multiple lacunes as detected by magnetic resonance imaging; and any significant systemic condition that could lead to difficulty complying with the protocol. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,113 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The panel cautions users of this guideline that there is significant variability in diagnostic test accuracy and many commercially available BBM tests do not meet these thresholds, especially using a single cutoff. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic-review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this case-control study, blood biomarkers indicative of AD pathology demonstrated different dynamics of change after cardiac arrest. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 80 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Increased cerebrospinal fluid neurofilament light (NfL) is a recognized biomarker for neurodegeneration that can also be assessed in blood. 1 key finding →
Participants: 805 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Blood biomarkers have great potential to advance clinical care and accelerate trials in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 70 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40${{\rm A}\beta }_{42}/{{\rm A}\beta }_{40}$ may begin declining decades prior to brain amyloid accumulation, whereas p-tau ratios, GFAP, and NfL increase closer in time. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 199 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Plasma markers can track biological change over time, with plasma pTau181 and GFAP markers showing longitudinal change in individuals with preclinical AD. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 373 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer disease comorbid pathologic characteristics are common and are associated with more rapid cognitive decline in patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB); therefore, it is anticipated that plasma p-tau concentrations may have utility in assessing cognitive impairment in individuals with this disorder. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 371 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this largely presymptomatic population, these results suggest subtle differences across plasma p-tau species and platforms for the prediction of amyloid and tau PET and magnetic resonance imaging measures of cerebrovascular and Alzheimer-related pathology. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,329 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Blood biomarkers indicating elevated amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology in preclinical Alzheimer's disease are needed to facilitate the initial screening process of participants in disease-modifying trials. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
P-tau181 detected AD at MCI and dementia stages and was strongly associated with cognitive decline and gray matter loss. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Mass spectrometry plasma measures performed significantly better than any other measure (amyloid-β1-42/1-40: 0.817; 0.770-0.864 and amyloid-β composite: 0.820; 0.775-0.866). 2 key findings →
Participants: 502 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Elecsys-derived CSF biomarkers detect AD neuropathologic changes with very high discriminative accuracy in vivo. 2 key findings →
Participants: 27 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings highlight the diagnostic and longitudinal monitoring potential of GFAP and p-tau for preclinical AD. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
N-p-tau217 and N-p-tau181 could improve diagnostic accuracy in prodromal-AD and clinical trial recruitment as both identify Aβ pathophysiology and differentiate early MCI-AD better than Mid-p-tau181. 2 key findings →
Participants: 503 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Plasma P-tau181/Aβ42 ratio may be a noninvasive means of identifying AD with elevated brain amyloid in populations with concomitant CeVD. 3 key findings →
Participants: 43 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Well-authenticated biomarkers can provide critical insights into the biological basis of Alzheimer disease (AD) to enable timely and accurate diagnosis, estimate future burden and support therapeutic trials. 5 key findings →
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 →