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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72/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 72 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2021-11-01
When identifying participants with abnormal CSF Aβ42/40 in the whole cohort, plasma IP-MS-WashU Aβ42/40 showed significantly higher accuracy (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC], 0.86; 95% CI, 0.81-0.90) than LC-MS-Arc Aβ42/40, IA-Elc Aβ42/40, IA-EI Aβ42/40, and IA-N4PE Aβ42/40 (AUC range, 0.69-0.78; P Conclusions and relevance The results from 2 independent cohorts indicate that certain MS-based methods performed better than most of the immunoassays for plasma Aβ42/40 when detecting brain Aβ pathology. 2 key findings →
Participants: 182
Evidence: moderate
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Neuroinflammatory biomarkers are associated with AD progression. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis
Evidence: high
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Plasma p-tau217/Aβ42 has high performance in detecting cerebral AD pathologies, thus offering a promising tool for clinical diagnosis and community screening of AD. 1 key finding →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 512
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2019-09-01
The mean (SD) age of the 842 participants in cohort 1 was 72 (5.6) years, with a range of 59 to 88 years, and 446 (52.5%) were female. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 842
Evidence: moderate
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2023-02-01
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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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2018-08-01
After correcting for multiple comparisons using the Bonferroni procedure, we observed a statistically significant interaction between APOE-ε4 and sex on CSF total tau (β = 0.41; 95% CI, 0.27-0.55; P Conclusions and relevance We provide robust evidence of a stronger association between APOE-ε4 and CSF tau levels among women compared with men across multiple independent data sets. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,798
Evidence: moderate
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Although studies in animal models suggest that TREM2 is protective against Alzheimer's pathology, its effect on tau pathology and its potential beneficial role in people with Alzheimer's disease is still unclear. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 155
Evidence: moderate
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Increased cerebrospinal fluid neurofilament light (NfL) is a recognized biomarker for neurodegeneration that can also be assessed in blood. 1 key finding →
Participants: 805
Evidence: low
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71/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 71 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2021-05-24
A combination of plasma phospho-tau (P-tau) and other accessible biomarkers might provide accurate prediction about the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. 2 key findings →
Participants: 340
Evidence: low
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70/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100.
·
Nature medicine
·
2026-02-19
Predicting not just if, but also when, cognitively unimpaired individuals are likely to develop onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptoms would be useful to clinical trials and, eventually, clinical practice. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 603
Evidence: moderate
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Plasma p-tau217 is a prognostic marker for identifying individuals who will develop cognitive impairment within ten years. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort
Participants: 215
Evidence: moderate
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70/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 70 out of 100.
·
Neurology
·
2025-05-15
In DDI (n = 431), participants were classified as CN A-/T- (n = 169), A+/T- (CN = 26, MCI = 24), A+/T+ (CN = 40, MCI = 105), and A-/T+ (CN = 34, MCI = 33), with a mean age of 64.1 years and 55.9% female. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 431
Evidence: moderate
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69/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 69 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2020-03-01
Patients in the CBS-AD group had a longer diagnostic latency, relatively benign clinical trajectory, greater cognitive impairment, and higher APOE-ε4 allele frequency than those in the CBS-non-AD group (AUC, 0.80-0.87; P Conclusions and relevance These findings suggest that studies focusing on the PSP-RS subtype are likely to miss a large number of patients with underlying PSP tau pathology. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 76
Evidence: moderate
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However, some individuals have subtle symptoms associated with acute MRI lesions. 5 key findings →
Design: systematic review
Participants: 21
Evidence: high
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Baseline plasma GFAP could detect abnormal CSF Aβ42/40 and CSF Aβ42/T-tau with an AUC of 0.79 (95% CI 0.72-0.86) and 0.80 (95% CI 0.72-0.86), respectively. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Evidence: moderate
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68/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2019-03-01
Cognitive testing follow-up occurred for 1 to 18 years (mean [SD], 0.98 [2.25] years); autopsy-verified diagnoses were available for 120 of 845 participants with diseases (14.2%). 2 key findings →
Design: case-control study
Participants: 913
Evidence: moderate
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68/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100.
·
Neurology
·
2023-05-24
In a community-based cohort of 70-year olds, P-NfL was associated with both prevalent and incident CKD, while CSF and/or imaging measures did not differ by CKD status. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 744
Evidence: moderate
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68/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2025-07-01
There were 838 BioFINDER-2 participants (mean age, 73.9 [SD, 7.3] years; 431 women [51%]; 407 men [49%]) and 380 ADNI participants (average age, 72.9 [SD, 7.0] years; 194 women [51%]; 186 mean [49%]) included. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional
Participants: 838
Evidence: moderate
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68/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 68 out of 100.
·
Nature aging
·
2023-05-18
Blood-based biomarkers hold great promise to revolutionize the diagnostic and prognostic work-up of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in clinical practice. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Evidence: moderate
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Elecsys CSF biomarker assays may provide reliable alternatives to PET in Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. 3 key findings →
Participants: 277
Evidence: moderate
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Neurofilament proteins have been validated as specific body fluid biomarkers of neuro-axonal injury. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Evidence: moderate
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67/100
✓ Peer-reviewed
alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100.
·
JAMA neurology
·
2023-12-01
Data from 3960 MRI sessions among 1141 participants were included: 252 pathogenic variant carriers from DIAN (mean [SD] age, 38.4 [11.2] years; 137 [54%] female), 571 older adults from ADNI (mean [SD] age, 72.8 [7.3] years; 274 [48%] female), and 318 older adults from HABS (mean [SD] age, 72.4 [7.6] years; 194 [61%] female). 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study
Participants: 1,141
Evidence: moderate
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See Li and Donohue (doi:10.1093/brain/awy089) for a scientific commentary on this article. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study
Participants: 338
Evidence: moderate
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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
- 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 27,780 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.