27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
The Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC) performed a genome-wide association study of late-onset Alzheimer disease using a three-stage design consisting of a discovery stage (stage 1) and two replication stages (stages 2 and 3). 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This 2026 update is an even larger follow-up to the 2022 Bellenguez GWAS, combining data from nearly 1 million people. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 978,514 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Intelligence is highly heritable 1 and a major determinant of human health and well-being 2 . 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 269,867 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Collecting cases for case-control genetic association studies can be time-consuming and expensive. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 116,196 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
This was, at the time, the largest genetic study of Alzheimer's disease ever done, comparing DNA from over 111,000 people with the disease (or a strong family history) to nearly 680,000 people without it. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 788,989 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The past decade has witnessed hundreds of reports declaring or refuting genetic association with putative Alzheimer disease susceptibility genes. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Genome-wide association studies have discovered numerous genomic loci associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD); yet the causal genes and variants are incompletely identified. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
Gene dosage of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) epsilon 4 allele is a major risk factor for familial Alzheimer disease (AD) of late onset (after age 60). 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Gaining insight into the downstream consequences of non-coding variants is an essential step towards the identification of therapeutic targets from genome-wide association study (GWAS) findings. 4 key findings →
Participants: 31,684 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified >80 Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD)-associated genetic loci. 3 key findings →
Participants: 7,804 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Previously derived polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for Alzheimer's disease (AD) perform inconsistently across diverse ancestries. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alpha-2-macroglobulin (alpha-2M; encoded by the gene A2M) is a serum pan-protease inhibitor that has been implicated in Alzheimer disease (AD) based on its ability to mediate the clearance and degradation of A beta, the major component of beta-amyloid deposits. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Microglia, the tissue-resident macrophages of the central nervous system (CNS), play critical roles in immune defense, development and homeostasis. 1 key finding →
Participants: 141 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. 2 key findings →
Participants: 1,114 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The relationship between genetic variation and gene expression in brain cell types and subtypes remains understudied. 2 key findings →
Participants: 424 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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
Genome-wide association studies of neurological diseases have identified thousands of variants associated with disease phenotypes. 1 key finding →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many risk loci for Alzheimer's disease (AD) 1,2 , but how these loci confer AD risk is unclear. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) depends on environmental and heritable factors, with its molecular etiology still unclear. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Protein aggregation is the hallmark of neurodegeneration, but the molecular mechanisms underlying late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) are unclear. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Genetics can provide a systematic approach to discovering the tissues and cell types relevant for a complex disease or trait. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
The gene-regulatory landscape of the brain is highly dynamic in health and disease, coordinating a menagerie of biological processes across distinct cell types. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) is crucial for maintenance of methylation, gene regulation and chromatin stability. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
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.
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.
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 →