27,780 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
This study found that a commercially available plasma p-tau217 immunoassay accurately identified biological AD, comparable with results using CSF biomarkers, with reproducible cut-offs across cohorts. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 786 Evidence: high
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An unresolved question for the understanding of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology is why a significant percentage of amyloid-β (Aβ)-positive cognitively unimpaired (CU) individuals do not develop detectable downstream tau pathology and, consequently, clinical deterioration. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 1,016 Evidence: moderate
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Plasma %p-tau217WashU had the highest performance, with significantly higher AUCs than all the immunoassays (Pdiff < 0.007). 5 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 998 Evidence: high
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Among 171 Aβ-positive CU participants included in the main analyses, 119 (mean [SD] age, 73.0 [5.4] years; 60.5% female) were from the BioFINDER-1 study, and 52 (mean [SD] age, 64.4 [4.6] years; 65.4% female) were from the WRAP study. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 564 Evidence: moderate
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Elevated brain iron observed in AD has been associated with accelerated cognitive decline and may be a tractable drug target. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 167 Evidence: high
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Among older adults without cognitive impairment or dementia, both an unfavorable lifestyle and high genetic risk were significantly associated with higher dementia risk. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 383 Evidence: moderate
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Concentrations of plasma p-tau181 were compared with established CSF and PET biomarkers and longitudinal measurements using Spearman correlation, area under the curve (AUC), and linear regression analyses. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,131 Evidence: moderate
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Although recent clinical trials targeting amyloid-β in Alzheimer's disease have shown promising results, there is increasing evidence suggesting that understanding alternative disease pathways that interact with amyloid-β metabolism and amyloid pathology might be important to halt the clinical deterioration. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 75 Evidence: moderate
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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
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Among 10 095 participants (67.3% men; aged 35-55 years in 1985-1988), a total of 1710 cases of diabetes and 639 cases of dementia were recorded over a median follow-up of 31.7 years. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 95 Evidence: moderate
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Compelling experimental evidence suggests that microglial activation is involved in the spread of tau tangles over the neocortex in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 130 Evidence: moderate
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The NfL level was increased at baseline in patients with mild cognitive impairment and AD dementia (mean levels: cognitive unimpairment, 32.1 ng/L; mild cognitive impairment, 37.9 ng/L; and AD dementia, 45.9 ng/L; P Conclusions and relevance The findings suggest that plasma NfL can be used as a noninvasive biomarker associated with neurodegeneration in patients with AD and may be useful to monitor effects in trials of disease-modifying drugs. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,583 Evidence: moderate
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The neuropathological confirmation of amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) remains the gold standard for a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 115 Evidence: moderate
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Whilst cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and positron emission tomography (PET) biomarkers for amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau pathologies are accurate for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), their broad implementation in clinical and trial settings are restricted by high cost and limited accessibility. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,000 Evidence: moderate
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Among the 6514 participants (mean age, 69.5 years; 50.5% female), median follow-up time ranged from 1.5 to 4.0 years. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 6,514 Evidence: moderate
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Exclusion criteria included any significant neurologic disorder other than suspected AD; presence of infection, infarction, or multiple lacunes as detected by magnetic resonance imaging; and any significant systemic condition that could lead to difficulty complying with the protocol. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,113 Evidence: moderate
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Of 236 eligible participants screened, 43 were excluded. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 142 Evidence: high
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Smoothing splines demonstrated that earliest plasma p-tau181 changes occurred even before amyloid-β markers reached abnormal levels, with greater rates of change correlating with increased amyloid-β pathology. 4 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 1,067 Evidence: moderate
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During 1 110 831 person-years at risk, we recorded 245 573 hospitalisations in the Finnish cohorts; the corresponding numbers in the UK study were 60 946 hospitalisations in 186 572 person-years. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 9,838 Evidence: moderate
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The association between BMI and dementia is likely to be attributable to two different processes: a harmful effect of higher BMI, which is observable in long follow-up, and a reverse-causation effect that makes a higher BMI to appear protective when the follow-up is short. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,894 Evidence: moderate
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This study found no evidence of a neuroprotective effect of physical activity. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 329 Evidence: moderate
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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
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Adherence to the Life Simple 7 ideal cardiovascular health recommendations in midlife was associated with a lower risk of dementia later in life. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 7,899 Evidence: moderate
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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
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More frequent social contact at age 60 years was associated with lower dementia risk (hazard ratio [HR] for each SD higher social contact frequency = 0.88 [95% CI 0.79, 0.98], p = 0.02); effect size of the association of social contact at 50 or 70 years with dementia was similar (0.92 [95% CI 0.83, 1.02], p = 0.13 and 0.91 [95% CI 0.78, 1.06], p = 0.23, respectively) but not statistically significant. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 10,228 Evidence: moderate
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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 27,780 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 27,780 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.1% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.3%), 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 →