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 1–25 of 37 studies in Getting a diagnosis with an author at University of Washington (US) (page 1 of 2) · 27,380 in the whole library · How the 0–100 score works

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.

The results from utilization of the UDS highlight the possibility for numerous research institutions to successfully collaborate, produce, and use standardized data collection instruments for over a decade. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 4,820 Evidence: moderate

Reductions in cerebral glucose metabolic rate (CMRglu) as measured by fludeoxyglucose F 18-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) in parietotemporal, frontal, and cingulate cortices are associated with increased AD risk and can be observed years before dementia onset. 4 key findings →

Evidence: high

Association of incident dementia with hospitalizations

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2012-01-01

Four hundred ninety-four individuals eventually developed dementia and 427 (86%) of these persons were admitted at least once; 2525 remained free of dementia and 1478 (59%) of those were admitted at least once. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 3,019 Evidence: moderate

Association between acute care and critical illness hospitalization and cognitive function in older adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100. JAMA 2010-02-01

During a mean (SD) follow-up of 6.1 (3.2) years, 1601 participants had no hospitalization, 1287 had 1 or more noncritical illness hospitalizations, and 41 had 1 or more critical illness hospitalizations. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,929 Evidence: moderate

The pathophysiological process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is thought to begin many years before the diagnosis of AD dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) has developed brief, comprehensive, and reliable batteries of clinical and neuropsychological tests for assessment of patients with the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 5 key findings →

Participants: 350 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

Among older Medicare beneficiaries, incident AF is common and has remained relatively stable for more than a decade. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 433,123 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

The neuropathologic examination is considered to provide the gold standard for Alzheimer disease (AD). 5 key findings →

Participants: 1,198 Evidence: low

The 3D-CAM operationalizes the CAM algorithm using a 3-minute structured assessment with high sensitivity and specificity relative to a reference standard and could be an important tool for improving recognition of delirium. 2 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 201 Evidence: low

Distinguishing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) currently relies on a clinical history and examination, but positron emission tomography with [(18)F] fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG-PET) shows different patterns of hypometabolism in these disorders that might aid differential diagnosis. 5 key findings →

Participants: 31 Evidence: low

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegeneration characterized by the abnormal accumulation of hyperphosphorylated tau protein within the brain. 2 key findings →

Evidence: low

The current study is a controlled clinical investigation of two nonpharmacological treatments of depression in patients with Alzheimer's disease. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Cerebrovascular disease and vascular risk factors are associated with Alzheimer's disease, but the evidence for their association with other neurodegenerative disorders is limited. 3 key findings →

Evidence: low

Standardized automated analysis of (18)F-FDG PET scans may provide an objective and sensitive support to the clinical diagnosis in early dementia. 1 key finding →

Participants: 548 Evidence: low

Higher structural stiffness of the carotid artery is associated with cognitive decline, whereas both structural and load‐dependent stiffness are associated with brain structural abnormalities common in Alzheimer disease‐related dementias. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 2,489 Evidence: moderate

This study of a large series of community-based incident dementia cases provides a way of judging the adequacy of currently available clinical diagnostic criteria. 2 key findings →

Participants: 134 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