Subjects were 404 persons in the Religious Orders Study, a cohort study of aging, who underwent annual clinical evaluations, including 19 neuropsychological tests from which 5 cognitive domain and global summary scores were derived, and brain autopsy at time-of-death (mean age-at-death 86). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 404
Evidence: moderate
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The pathologic indices of Alzheimer disease, cerebrovascular disease, and Lewy body disease accumulate in the brains of older persons with and without dementia, but the extent to which they account for late life cognitive decline remains unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 856
Evidence: moderate
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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a common, fatal motor neuron disorder with no effective treatment. 4 key findings →
Participants: 111
Evidence: low
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The degree to which Alzheimer's versus other neuropathologies contribute to the risk of Alzheimer's dementia is unknown. 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,161
Evidence: low
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Thirty percent of the cases had significant cerebrovascular parenchymal pathology scores (CVDPS), 54% had significant AD pathology, and 18% had HS. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Evidence: moderate
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We present here both linear regressions and multivariate analyses correlating three global neuropsychological tests with a number of structural and neurochemical measurements performed on a prospective series of 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease and 9 neuropathologically normal subjects. 4 key findings →
Participants: 15
Evidence: low
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Using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) population, we examined (1) cross-sectional relationships between amyloid deposition, hypometabolism, and cognition, and (2) associations between amyloid and hypometabolism measurements and longitudinal cognitive measurements. 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Evidence: moderate
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Astrocytes fulfill neuronal trophic roles normally, but are transformed in Alzheimer disease (AD) into A1-type reactive astrocytes that may destroy neurons through unknown mechanisms. 2 key findings →
Participants: 28
Evidence: low
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Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is used widely for assessment of patients with cognitive impairment, but the pathological correlates are unclear, especially when multiple pathologies are present. 4 key findings →
Participants: 93
Evidence: moderate
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Although previous research has shown that initiation of postmenopausal estrogen hormone therapy (HT) in late life increases risk of dementia, animal studies and some observational studies have suggested that midlife use of HT may be beneficial; however, this has not been rigorously investigated in large population-based studies. 4 key findings →
Participants: 1,524
Evidence: low
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The distribution and density of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques was studied in a unique series of cases whose premortem cognitive status had been assessed with the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), including 39 nondemented cases (CDR = 0; age, 51-88 years), 15 very mildly demented cases (CDR = 0.5), and 8 severely demented (CDR = 3) cases. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Compared with healthy controls, patients with ALS - particularly those with cognitive impairment (ALSci) or ALS-FTD - showed elevated AD-related biomarkers. 5 key findings →
Participants: 192
Evidence: low
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Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) results from deposition of β-amyloid in the media and adventitia of small arteries and capillaries of the leptomeninges and cerebral cortex and is a major cause of lobar intracerebral hemorrhage and cognitive impairment in the elderly. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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TDP-43 (TAR-DNA binding protein) aggregates in neuronal inclusions in motoneuron disease (MND), as well as in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and FTLD associated with MND (FTLD-MND). 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Ultrastructural studies of biopsied cortical tissue from the right frontal lobe of 8 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) revealed that the number of synapses in lamina III of Brodmann's area 9 was significantly decreased when compared with the number in age-matched control brains (n = 9; postmortem time, less than 13 hours).
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Diagnoses of dementia, probable AD, and MCI in 636 autopsied subjects from the Religious Order Study and the Rush Memory and Aging Project were based on clinical evaluation and cognitive performance tests. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Several mutations in the amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene have been found to associate with pathologic deposition of the beta-amyloid peptide (Abeta) in neuritic plaques or in the walls of cerebral vessels. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Postmortem examination was performed on 137 residents (average age 85.5 years) of a skilled nursing facility whose mental status, memory, and functional status had been evaluated during life.
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Concomitant LATE-NC and vascular pathology were equally common, and cognition was equally impaired, in PART (Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE] = 24.8 ± 6.9) and ADNC (MMSE = 24.2 ± 6.0). 5 key findings →
Participants: 45
Evidence: low
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The cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) dementia, which is a frequent late manifestation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, is unknown but radiological and pathological studies have implicated alterations in subcortical white matter. 4 key findings →
Participants: 12
Evidence: low
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Olfactory dysfunction is common in Alzheimer disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative diseases. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Phenotypic heterogeneity in sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is well documented, but there is not yet a systematic classification of the disease variants. 1 key finding →
Evidence: low
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Recently, alpha-synuclein was shown to be a structural component of the filaments in Lewy bodies (LBs) of Parkinson's disease (PD), dementia with LBs (DLB) as well as the LB variant of Alzheimer's disease, and this suggests that alpha-synuclein could play a mechanistic role in the pathogenesis of these disorders. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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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
- Randomized / 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
- Multicenter 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 32,180 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.