Ann Neurol 2018;84:737-748. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 443 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Amyloid-beta 42 (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) reflect core features of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) more directly than clinical diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Participants: 8,074 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Tau plays a key role in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology, and accumulating evidence suggests that lowering tau may reduce this pathology. 1 key finding →
Design: phase-1-trial Participants: 46 Evidence: early
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In this genetic association study, a novel variant associated with AD was identified: R251G always coinherited with ε4 on the APOE gene, which mitigates the ε4-associated AD risk. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 37 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Estimates of AD disease duration become more accurate if age, sex, setting, APOE, and cerebrospinal fluid tau are taken into account. 2 key findings →
Participants: 3,268 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
A polygenic score (PGS) for Alzheimer's disease (AD) was derived recently from data on genome-wide significant loci in European ancestry populations. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The current conceptualization of Alzheimer disease (AD) is driven by the amyloid hypothesis, in which a deterministic chain of events leads from amyloid deposition and then tau deposition to neurodegeneration and progressive cognitive impairment. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Within APOE ε4 carriers, sex differences in CSF p-Tau are more evident in early disease stages, whereas for APOE ε4 noncarriers, sex differences are more evident in advanced disease stages. 3 key findings →
Participants: 1,801 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Copy-number variants (CNVs) are major contributors to human disease. 2 key findings →
Design: case-control Participants: 22,319 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The APOE locus is the strongest genetic factor for Alzheimer's disease, with ε4 increasing and ε2 decreasing risk, yet the basis of these opposing effects remains unclear. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among 4080 participants included in the analysis, the mean (SD) age was 66.5 (8.9) years, and 2241 (54.9%) were female. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 4,080 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The mean whole-brain atrophy rate was -1.9 +/- 0.9% per year. 2 key findings →
Participants: 65 Evidence: low
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Among the more than 90 identified genetic risk loci for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias, the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene ɛ2/ɛ3/ɛ4 polymorphisms remain the longstanding benchmark for genetic disease risk with a consistently large effect across studies 1-10 . 5 key findings →
Design: case-control Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings suggest that APOE genotype has a differential effect on the distribution of amyloid plaques and glucose metabolism. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Analysis of the genotyping data revealed that the TMEM106B locus consists of four major haplotypes: HA/Ha (covering the coding region), and HB/Hb (covering the upstream regulatory region). 5 key findings →
Participants: 182 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
43/100
Damaging nonsynonymous ABCA1 variants had differential AD risk effects between APOE genotype groups and exhibited interaction effects with APOE ε2 and ε4. 5 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings highlight normative modelling's utility in revealing the complex interplay among sex, age, and AD risk in shaping brain structure and cognition in later life. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The genetic architecture of sporadic Early-Onset Alzheimer Disease (sEOAD, onset ≤65 years) remains largely unknown. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Genetic variation at the TMEM106B locus has been associated with Alzheimers disease (AD) and related neurodegenerative phenotypes, yet its haplotypic architecture remains incompletely resolved. 2 key findings →
Participants: 493 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,180 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 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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.
1,034 records (3.7% 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 →