Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

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

Find studies

Showing 1–22 of 22 studies in Getting a diagnosis with an author at University of California, Los Angeles (US) · 31,380 in the whole library · How the 0–100 score works

Download bibliography of these 22 studies, in this order: BibTeX (.bib) · RIS (.ris)

Browse by subject, author or institution

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

What “Getting a diagnosis” covers

Getting a diagnosis — How Alzheimer's is identified, how accurate the tests are, and how early it can be caught.

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.

Dementia has been increasingly more recognized to be a common feature in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), especially in old age. 4 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

Positron emission tomography in evaluation of dementia: Regional brain metabolism and long-term outcome

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2001-11-01

Progressive dementia was detected by PET with a sensitivity of 93% (191/206) and a specificity of 76% (59/78). 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 146 Evidence: moderate

Clinicopathological correlations in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. Brain : a journal of neurology 2017-12-01

Patients with FTLD were distributed between FTLD-tau (34 patients: 10 corticobasal degeneration, nine progressive supranuclear palsy, eight Pick's disease, three frontotemporal dementia with parkinsonism associated with chromosome 17, three unclassifiable tauopathy, and one argyrophilic grain disease); FTLD-TDP (55 patients: nine type A including one with motor neuron disease, 27 type B including 21 with motor neuron disease, eight type C with right temporal lobe presentations, and 11 unclassifiable including eight with motor neuron disease), FTLD-FUS (eight patients), and one patient with FTLD-ubiquitin proteasome system positive inclusions (FTLD-UPS) that stained negatively for tau, TDP-43, and FUS. 4 key findings →

Participants: 438 Evidence: moderate

Diagnosis and management of dementia with Lewy bodies: third report of the DLB Consortium

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Neurology 2005-10-19

The dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) Consortium has revised criteria for the clinical and pathologic diagnosis of DLB incorporating new information about the core clinical features and suggesting improved methods to assess them. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

Research criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease: revising the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 63 out of 100. The Lancet. Neurology 2007-08-01

The NINCDS-ADRDA and the DSM-IV-TR criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the prevailing diagnostic standards in research; however, they have now fallen behind the unprecedented growth of scientific knowledge. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

Levels of CSF Abeta42 decrease and levels of CSF tau increase in AD. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 74 Evidence: moderate

Dementia in AIDS patients: incidence and risk factors. Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Neurology 1993-11-01

We determined incidence and future projections of dementia after AIDS onset in 492 homosexual men with AIDS in the Baltimore/Los Angeles sites of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, 64 of whom developed dementia. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

The overlap of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 59 out of 100. Neurology 2002-10-01

Patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) with no known diagnosis of ALS or family history of ALS were clinically and electrophysiologically assessed for the presence of ALS. 1 key finding →

Participants: 36 Evidence: low

Clinical diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy: The movement disorder society criteria

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 59 out of 100. Movement Disorders 2017-05-03

Here, we present new criteria aimed to optimize early, sensitive, and specific clinical diagnosis of PSP on the basis of currently available evidence. © 2017 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

A preceding article described the clinical features of Parkinson's disease dementia (PD-D) and proposed clinical diagnostic criteria for "probable" and "possible" PD-D. The main focus of this article is to operationalize the diagnosis of PD-D and to propose practical guidelines based on a two level process depending upon the clinical scenario and the expertise of the evaluator involved in the assessment. 5 key findings →

Evidence: low

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act added a new Medicare benefit, the Annual Wellness Visit (AWV), effective January 1, 2011. 5 key findings →

Evidence: low

Alzheimer disease is progressive and irreversible, but pharmacologic therapies for cognitive impairment and nonpharmacologic and pharmacologic treatments for the behavioral problems associated with dementia can enhance quality of life. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

Alzheimer's disease: etiologies, pathophysiology, cognitive reserve, and treatment opportunities

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 51 out of 100. Neurology 1998-07-01

The most proximal brain events associated with the clinical expression of dementia are progressive neuronal dysfunction and loss of neurons in specific regions of the brain. 1 key finding →

Evidence: low

Most factors of the MoCA-B were significantly different between the two groups, and the PSCN group completed the MoCA-B faster (p 0.05). 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

↑ Change the filters

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 31,380 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 31,380 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (65.6% of the library) and OpenAlex (16.2%), 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.

1,048 records (3.3% of the library) are not peer-reviewed — 973 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    Where this research is being discussed: events