The impact of APOE4 on brain metabolism and structure is modified by sex. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 274 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
These results suggest that, to optimize observing a treatment effect, clinical trials enrolling cognitively normal individuals should selectively recruit participants with abnormal levels of both amyloid and tau (ie, stage 2) because this group would be expected to show the greatest cognitive decline over time if untreated. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
58/100
Compared with individuals with the APOEepsilon3/epsilon3, the odds of having AD were significantly increased among those with 1 or more copies of the epsilon4 allele; the odds ratio (OR) for the epsilon3/epsilon4 genotype was 2.6 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.8-3.7), and the OR for the epsilon4/epsilon4 genotype was 10.5 (95% CI, 5.1-21.8). 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 338 Evidence: moderate
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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
58/100
Among 4392 participants (mean [SD] age, 68.2 [7.8] years; 2359 [53.7%] women), 723 (16.5%) were APOE ε4 heterozygotes and 33 (0.8%) were APOE ε4 homozygotes. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 4,392 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
58/100
Of 413 477 All of Us participants, 2038 were eligible. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 26 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Disclosure (N = 194) and non-disclosure (N = 180) groups did not differ on IGT-AD (mean disclosure-non-disclosure difference [MD] at 6 weeks: -1.5, p = 0.14; 9 months: -1.2, p = 0.35; 15 months: -2.0, p = 0.07), IES-R (MD at 6 weeks: 0.00, p = 0.98; 9 months: 0.01, p = 0.84; 15 months: 0.03, p = 0.64), or change in secondary outcomes. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 194 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset, sporadic Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Apolipoprotein E (apoE) is a polymorphic gene involved in lipid metabolism with three common variant alleles (epsilon2, epsilon3, and epsilon4). 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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
57/100
The APOE-ε4/ε4 genotype is the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer's disease, though the relative risk is diminished in individuals with African ancestry. 2 key findings →
Design: case-control Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The protease inhibitor alpha 1-antichymotrypsin and the lipid transport protein apolipoprotein E (apoE) are intimately associated with the 42-amino-acid beta-peptide (A beta) in the filamentous amyloid deposits of Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Three decades of genetic research in Alzheimer disease (AD) have substantially broadened our understanding of the pathogenetic mechanisms leading to neurodegeneration and dementia. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Even in a highly selected lifespan sample of adults, Aβ deposition is apparent in some adults and is influenced by APOE status. 5 key findings →
Participants: 137 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Apolipoprotein E epsilon4 led to increased risk of AD among white subjects but not black subjects. 5 key findings →
Participants: 6,158 Evidence: low
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Our findings suggest that APOE epsilon4-mediated risk for Alzheimer disease is associated with widespread decline in rCBF over time that precedes the onset of dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mean IGF-1 levels were 144 ± 60 μg/L in generation 1 and 114 ± 37 μg/L in generation 2. 3 key findings →
Participants: 789 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our data indicate that the APOE ε4 allele is an important predictor of cognitive function in PD across multiple domains. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,079 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
As potential harbingers of future cognitive decline, physicians should query and monitor SMCs from their older patients. 1 key finding →
Participants: 531 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In women, increased plasma adiponectin levels are an independent risk factor for the development of both all-cause dementia and AD. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 159 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Eight single-nucleotide polymorphisms (false discovery rate P Conclusions and relevance Our findings demonstrate genetic overlap between AD and immune-mediated diseases and suggest that immune system processes influence AD pathogenesis and progression. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Our genome-wide search of Caribbean Hispanic individuals identified several novel genetic variants associated with LOAD and replicated these associations in a white cohort. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings enhance understanding of AD risk factors by relating validated susceptibility alleles to increased neuritic plaque pathology and implicate common genetic variation at the APP locus in the earliest, presymptomatic stages of AD. 4 key findings →
Participants: 114 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We systematically compared structural imaging patterns of advanced brain aging (ABA) in the general-population, herein defined as significant deviation from typical BA to those found in Alzheimer disease (AD). 5 key findings →
Participants: 2,705 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The data do not support an association between serum total cholesterol or high density lipoprotein in late life and subsequent risk of dementia or Alzheimer disease (AD). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 →