Get help now — free helplines

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.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

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

Find studies

Showing 1–25 of 1,459 studies in Brain scans and imaging (page 1 of 59) · 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 “Brain scans and imaging” covers

Brain scans and imaging — MRI, PET and other scans: what they show, how early, and how reliably.

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.

General baseline characteristics of the study population were mean (standard deviation) age, 58.1 (8.8) years; 47% women. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,087 Evidence: high

Mechanisms of lower oesophageal sphincter incompetence in patients with symptomatic gastrooesophageal reflux

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 84 out of 100. Gut 1988-08-01

Visually impaired individuals were more likely to develop incident dementia, with a progressively greater risk among those with worse visual acuity. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 117,187 Evidence: high

Data extraction and synthesis This analysis involved random-effects meta-analyses on group-level study results of clinical data and systematic review of the neuroimaging literature. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 591 Evidence: high

Diabetes in Older Adults: A Consensus Report

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 81 out of 100. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 2012-10-25

More than 25% of the U.S. population aged ≥ 65 years has diabetes mellitus (hereafter referred to as diabetes),1 and the aging of the overall population is a significant driver of the diabetes epidemic. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,000 Evidence: high

Treatment with donanemab resulted in rapid reduction of amyloid, even after a single dose. 5 key findings →

Participants: 18 Evidence: high

Optical Coherence Tomography in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease: What Can It Tell Us?

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 80 out of 100. Eye and brain 2021-01-08

Seventy-one studies were included for review, representing a total of 6757 patients (2350 AD, 793 MCI, 2902 healthy controls (HC), and 841 others with a range of other neurodegenerative diagnoses). 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 6,757 Evidence: high

Trial of Solanezumab in Preclinical Alzheimer's Disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 79 out of 100. The New England journal of medicine 2023-07-17

Solanezumab, which targets monomeric amyloid in persons with elevated brain amyloid levels, did not slow cognitive decline as compared with placebo over a period of 240 weeks in persons with preclinical Alzheimer's disease. 3 key findings →

Design: clinical trial Participants: 1,169 Evidence: low

EA intervention could increase the MoCA score and improve the neutral and consistency response of the STROOP test in VCIND patients (P < 0.05). fMRI functional connectivity analysis showed that, after EA, the default mode network (DMN) function of the posterior cingulate gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, left anterior cingulate gyrus, left and right superior temporal gyrus, right insula, left precentral gyrus and other brain regions were significantly higher than that in the control group. 5 key findings →

Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 70 Evidence: high

Meta-analysis of amyloid-cognition relations in cognitively normal older adults

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 78 out of 100. Neurology 2013-04-01

Based on this meta-analytic survey of the literature, increased amyloid burden has small but nontrivial associations with specific domains of cognitive performance in individuals who are currently cognitively normal. 3 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 7,140 Evidence: high

Brain networks or 'connectomes' include a minority of highly connected hub nodes that are functionally valuable, because their topological centrality supports integrative processing and adaptive behaviours. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 56 Evidence: high

We found a sequence to pathological changes, with rates of Aβ deposition in mutation carriers being significantly different from those in non-carriers first (across regions that showed a significant difference, at a mean of 18·9 years [SD 3·3] before expected onset), followed by hypometabolism (14·1 years [5·1] before expected onset), and lastly structural decline (4·7 years [4·2] before expected onset). 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 346 Evidence: moderate

Thinning of retinal layers, measured using optical coherence tomography (OCT), is associated with some neurodegenerative disorders such as established Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. 5 key findings →

Design: systematic review Participants: 622 Evidence: high

Sex Differences in Longitudinal Tau-PET in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease: A Meta-Analysis

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 76 out of 100. JAMA neurology 2025-03-03

Mounting evidence in adults without AD indicates that females exhibit higher tau deposition than age-matched males, particularly in the setting of elevated β-amyloid (Aβ), but the evidence for sex differences in tau accumulation rates is inconclusive. 5 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,376 Evidence: high

Plasma pTau217R matched CSF eMTBR-tau243 and outperformed MTBR-tau243. 5 key findings →

Participants: 242 Evidence: low

Seventeen studies with cognitively impaired Parkinson's disease patients were included consisting of 222 Parkinson's disease patients with mild cognitive impairment, 68 patients with Parkinson's disease dementia, 289 cognitively unimpaired Parkinson's disease patients and 353 healthy controls. 4 key findings →

Design: meta-analysis Participants: 68 Evidence: high

We found that distinct sphingolipid species including sphingomyelin (SM) with acyl residue sums C16:0, C18:1, and C16:1 (SM C16:0, SM C18:1, SM C16:1) and hydroxysphingomyelin with acyl residue sum C14:1 (SM (OH) C14:1) were consistently associated with severity of AD pathology at autopsy and AD progression across prodromal and preclinical stages. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 44 Evidence: moderate

Association Between Elevated Brain Amyloid and Subsequent Cognitive Decline Among Cognitively Normal Persons

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. JAMA 2017-06-01

Among the 445 participants (243 with normal amyloid, 202 with elevated amyloid), mean (SD) age was 74.0 (5.9) years, mean education was 16.4 (2.7) years, and 52% were women. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 243 Evidence: moderate

CSF biomarkers of neuroinflammation and cerebrovascular dysfunction in early Alzheimer disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 73 out of 100. Neurology 2018-07-27

Neuroinflammation and cerebrovascular dysfunction are early events occurring already at presymptomatic stages of AD and contribute to disease progression. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 508 Evidence: moderate

The Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI): MRI methods

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging 2008-02-26

The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a longitudinal multisite observational study of healthy elders, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease. 5 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate

↑ Change the filters

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