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Find studies

Showing 1–25 of 76 studies in Digital health tools published 2021 (page 1 of 4) · 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 “Digital health tools” covers

Digital health tools — Apps, wearables, online tests and other technology used to detect, monitor or support people with dementia.

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.

Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) detects functional connectivity (FC) abnormalities that occur in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). 3 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

Our results revealed machine learning with novel biomarkers and multiple variables may increase the sensitivity and specificity in diagnosis of AD. 2 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

The prevalence and incidence of early-onset dementia among adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is currently unknown. 5 key findings →

Design: case-control study Participants: 12,648 Evidence: moderate

This cohort study found that COVID-19 mortality decreased over time during 2020 and that patient demographic characteristics and comorbidities were associated with higher clinical severity. 5 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 174 Evidence: moderate

These findings suggest that machine learning algorithms could accurately predict incident dementia within 2 years in patients receiving care at memory clinics using only 6 variables. 5 key findings →

Design: prospective cohort Participants: 307 Evidence: moderate

Although behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is classically defined by behavioral and socio-emotional changes, impairments often extend to other cognitive functions. 2 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 181 Evidence: high

Low-Value Care at the Actionable Level of Individual Health Systems

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 66 out of 100. JAMA internal medicine 2021-11-01

The findings of this large cohort study suggest that system-level measurement and reporting of specific low-value services is feasible, enables cross-system comparisons, and reveals a broad range of low-value care use. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

Although the performance of the different methods still has room for improvement, the results are promising and this methodology has a great potential as a support tool for clinicians and healthcare professionals. 3 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

Older adults with cognitive disorders can learn smartphone-based memory strategies and doing so benefits prospective memory functioning and independence. 2 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high

Evaluation of Wearable Technology in Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 64 out of 100. Frontiers in medicine 2021-01-11

Forty-eight studies from 18,456 screened abstracts (Dementia: n = 2,516, Control: n = 1,224) met inclusion criteria for the systematic review. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 2,516 Evidence: high

Early diagnosis of cognitive disorders in older adults is a major healthcare priority with benefits to patients, families, and health systems. 1 key finding →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

Strikingly gene-expression, network-based analysis and cell type deconvolution approaches revealed a consistent immune signature in the brain and blood of female AD patients that was absent in males. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high

The study consists of 25,186 patients (mean age = 63.0, interquartile range [IQR] of age = 15.1 years, male = 50%). 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Participants: 25,186 Evidence: moderate

Cardiometabolic risk factors associated with brain age and accelerate brain ageing

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. Human brain mapping 2021-10-09

The structure and integrity of the ageing brain is interchangeably linked to physical health, and cardiometabolic risk factors (CMRs) are associated with dementia and other brain disorders. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: high

Our results demonstrate that different MAPT mutations give rise to distinct atrophy patterns and clinical phenotype, providing insights into the underlying disease biology and potential utility for patient stratification in therapeutic trials. 3 key findings →

Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate

There is increasing interest in the use of technology to support social health in dementia. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Evidence: high

This simple and feasible cognitive impairment prediction model could identify community-dwelling elderly people at the greatest 3-year risk for cognitive impairment, which could help community nurses in the early identification of dementia. 1 key finding →

Design: prospective cohort Evidence: moderate

Illness duration and symptom prevalence, duration, and burden were analysed for children testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 for whom illness duration could be determined, and were assessed overall and for younger (age 5-11 years) and older (age 12-17 years) groups. 4 key findings →

Design: cohort study 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