27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
APOE ɛ4, the most significant genetic risk factor for Alzheimer disease (AD), may mask effects of other loci. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 4,203 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Points• UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40-69 years when recruited in 2006-2010.• The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.• Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.• UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public. 1 key finding →
Design: case-control study Participants: 500,000 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the best-known and the most often used short screening tool for providing an overall measure of cognitive impairment in clinical, research and community settings. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia is a progressive syndrome of global cognitive impairment with significant health and social care costs. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 9,422 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We identified 4 novel genetic loci that implicate inflammatory and glial proliferative pathways in the development of WMH in addition to previously proposed ischemic mechanisms. 2 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 17 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Whether novel risk variants of Alzheimer's disease (AD) identified through genome-wide association studies also influence magnetic resonance imaging-based intermediate phenotypes of AD in the general population is unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 8,175 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
¹⁸F-FDFG uptake by brain tissue as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) is a well-established method for assessment of brain function in people with dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 14 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease is associated with progression to dementia (Parkinson's disease dementia) in a majority of patients. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 39 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We observed a complex series of relationships between social-environment variables and cognitive decline and dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 2,854 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
In total, 1,234 articles were identified from the search; 21 articles met inclusion criteria. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
High-level evidence related to pharmacological strategies for managing Lewy body dementia is rare. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
More research is needed to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying these regional associations, which may involve motor and sensorimotor circuits hitherto largely neglected in the pathophysiology of AD. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
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For neuropsychology measures, we noted the earliest significant differences between mutation carriers and non-carriers 5 years before expected onset, when differences were significant for all measures except for tests of immediate recall and verbal fluency. 2 key findings →
Participants: 220 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Vascular dementia is one of the most common causes of dementia after Alzheimer's disease, causing around 15% of cases. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Alzheimer disease (AD) is characterized by the accumulation of amyloid plaques, which are predominantly composed of amyloid-β peptide. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Targeted sequencing of confirmed GWAS loci revealed an excess burden of deleterious coding mutations in LOAD, with the greatest burden observed in ABCA7 and BIN1. 4 key findings →
Participants: 176 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Dementia is receiving increasing attention from governments and politicians. 5 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Common single nucleotide polymorphisms in the SORL1 gene have been associated with late onset Alzheimer disease (LOAD), but causal variants have not been fully characterized nor has the mechanism been established. 4 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
The success rate of the pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) for dementia drugs has been abysmally low, in the last two decades. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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The ATP-binding cassette transporter A7 (ABCA7) has been identified as a susceptibility factor of late onset Alzheimer disease in genome-wide association studies. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We hypothesized that de novo variants (DNV) might participate in the genetic determinism of sporadic early-onset Alzheimer disease (EOAD, onset before 65 years). 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
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 27,380 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.
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 →