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

Find studies

Showing 1–25 of 62 studies in Getting a diagnosis scoring ≥ 70 out of 100 (page 1 of 3) · 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 double-cutoff approach revealed high confidence for interpreting scans as negative when Centiloid values were lower than 11 (95% CI, 9-13; I2 = 95%) and interpreting scans as positive if Centiloid values were higher than 26 (95% CI, 24-28; I2 = 95%). 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 49,227 Evidence: high

One hundred years of schizophrenia: a meta-analysis of the outcome literature

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 79 out of 100. The American journal of psychiatry 1994-10-01

Overall, less than half of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia have shown substantial clinical improvement after follow-up averaging nearly 6 years. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 51,800 Evidence: high

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

Effect of Intensive vs Standard Blood Pressure Control on Probable Dementia: A Randomized Clinical Trial

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 77 out of 100. JAMA 2019-02-01

Among ambulatory adults with hypertension, treating to a systolic blood pressure goal of less than 120 mm Hg compared with a goal of less than 140 mm Hg did not result in a significant reduction in the risk of probable dementia. 3 key findings →

Participants: 4,678 Evidence: high

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

Our random 20% sample included 848,303 fee-for-service Medicare decedents (mean age, 82.3 years; 57.9% female, 88.1% white). 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 270,202 Evidence: moderate

We did not apply any language or date restrictions to the electronic searches, and we did not use any methodological filters as a method to restrict the search overall. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 70 Evidence: high

Observational epidemiological studies have shown a positive association between hypertension and risk of incident dementia; however, the effects of antihypertensive therapy on cognitive function in controlled trials have been conflicting, and meta-analyses of the trials have not provided clear evidence of whether antihypertensive treatment reduces dementia incidence. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,687 Evidence: high

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

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

Plasma phosphorylated tau181 (P-tau181) might be increased in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its usefulness for differential diagnosis and prognosis is unclear. 2 key findings →

Participants: 589 Evidence: moderate

Sex Differences in Cognitive Decline Among US Adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 75 out of 100. JAMA network open 2021-02-01

Among 34 349 participants, 26 088 who self-reported Black or White race, were free of stroke and dementia, and had covariate data at or before the first cognitive assessment were included for analysis. 2 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 349 Evidence: moderate

The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the best-known and the most often used short screening tool for providing an overall measure of cognitive impairment in clinical, research and community settings. 4 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

AUC for amyloid and tau PET provide expert recommendations for clinical use of these technologies in the evolving landscape of diagnostics and therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic-review Evidence: moderate

Plasma p-tau231: a new biomarker for incipient Alzheimer's disease pathology

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 74 out of 100. Acta neuropathologica 2021-02-14

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

This meta-analysis pooled 14 studies of the Mini-Cog, a 3-minute memory-and-clock-drawing test doctors can give in a routine visit, to see how well it catches dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 7,194 Evidence: moderate

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

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

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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