28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
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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This study suggests that plasma GFAP is a sensitive biomarker for detecting and tracking reactive astrogliosis and Aβ pathology even among individuals in the early stages of AD. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 300 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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A rare variant in TREM2 (p.R47H, rs75932628) was recently reported to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and, subsequently, other neurodegenerative diseases, i.e. frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Parkinson's disease (PD). 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 828 Evidence: high
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Frontotemporal lobar degeneration with neuronal inclusions of the TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (FTLD-TDP) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder with only a limited number of risk loci identified. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 985 Evidence: high
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We identified 2 core dimensions of heterogeneity: typicality and severity. 2 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
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Supported by very low-to-moderate certainty of evidence, physical activity/exercise has a positive effect on several cognitive and noncognitive outcomes in people with MCI and dementia, but RCTs, with low risk of bias/confounding, are still needed to confirm these relationships. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 28,205 Evidence: high
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Furthermore, plasma p-tau231 was significantly increased in amyloid-β PET quartiles 2-4, whereas CSF p-tau217 and plasma p-tau181 increased only at quartiles 3-4 and 4, respectively. 2 key findings →
Participants: 588 Evidence: moderate
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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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This study reports the findings of the first large-scale Phase III investigator-driven clinical trial to slow the rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer disease with a dihydropyridine (DHP) calcium channel blocker, nilvadipine. 4 key findings →
Participants: 577 Evidence: high
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Computer-aided diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a rapidly developing field of neuroimaging with strong potential to be used in practice. 4 key findings →
Participants: 165 Evidence: moderate
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At randomization, the mean age is 72, 50% female, 77% with CDR-global score 0.5, and mean MMSE score 23.8. 5 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 464 Evidence: high
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For music-based therapeutic interventions compared to usual care, we found moderate-certainty evidence that, at the end of treatment, music-based therapeutic interventions probably improved depressive symptoms slightly (standardised mean difference (SMD) -0.23, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.42 to -0.04; 9 studies, 441 participants), and we found low-certainty evidence that it may have improved overall behavioural problems (SMD -0.31, 95% CI -0.60 to -0.02; 10 studies, 385 participants). 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,720 Evidence: moderate
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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
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In this case-control study, blood biomarkers indicative of AD pathology demonstrated different dynamics of change after cardiac arrest. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 80 Evidence: high
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We found that the mass spectrometry-based p-tau217 (p-tau217WashU) exhibited significantly better performance than all other plasma p-tau biomarkers when detecting abnormal Aβ status [area under curve (AUC) = 0.947; Pdiff 0.09), but higher compared with AUC of p-tau231UGOT, p-tau181Lilly, p-tau181UGOT, p-tau181Fuji and p-tau181Splex (AUCrange 0.642-0.813; Pdiff ≤ 0.029). 5 key findings →
Participants: 135 Evidence: low
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The total cost of disorders of the brain was estimated at €798 billion in 2010. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
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12,887 participants were interviewed at baseline. 11,718 were free of dementia, of whom 8137 (69%) were reinterviewed, contributing 34,718 person-years of follow-up. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 12,887 Evidence: moderate
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Participants allocated to CR received 10 weekly sessions over 3 months and four maintenance sessions over 6 months. 4 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Participants: 475 Evidence: high
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We conducted a meta-analysis of the conflicting epidemiologic evidence on the association between midlife body mass index (BMI) and dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 19 Evidence: high
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For all 4 phosphorylation sites assessed in CSF, p-tau was significantly more closely associated with amyloid-PET values than tau-PET values (p-tau181 difference, 13%; 95% CI, 3%-22%; P = .006; p-tau217 difference, 11%; 95% CI, 3%-20%; P = .003; p-tau231 difference, 15%; 95% CI, 5%-22%; P Conclusions and relevance Results of this cross-sectional study of 2 observational cohorts suggest that the p-tau abnormality as an early event in AD pathogenesis was associated with amyloid-β accumulation and highlights the need for careful interpretation of p-tau biomarkers in the context of the amyloid/tau/neurodegeneration, or A/T/(N), framework. 2 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 609 Evidence: moderate
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High and increasing blood pressure from early adulthood into midlife seems to be associated with increased WMHV and smaller brain volumes at 69-71 years of age. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 5,362 Evidence: moderate
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Current policy emphasises the importance of 'living well' with dementia, but there has been no comprehensive synthesis of the factors related to quality of life (QoL), subjective well-being or life satisfaction in people with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 198 Evidence: high
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Home based support for caregivers of persons with dementia, which emphasizes the use of locally available, low-cost human resources, is feasible, acceptable and leads to significant improvements in caregiver mental health and burden of caring. 3 key findings →
Design: randomized controlled trial Evidence: high
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Variation in service use among sites was most plausibly accounted for by stark differences in the extent of out-of-pocket expenses, and the ability of older people and their families to afford them. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 17,944 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
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 28,180 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.
This is a large sample of the Alzheimer's literature, not an exhaustive index of it. It holds 28,180 records, built mostly from automated pulls of Europe PMC (61.7% of the library) and OpenAlex (18.1%), 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 →