27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Study-level data from 14 studies, 2,310,330 individuals, and 102,174 dementia case patients were included. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,310,330 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Among persons without dementia, the prevalence of cerebral amyloid pathology as determined by positron emission tomography or cerebrospinal fluid findings was associated with age, APOE genotype, and presence of cognitive impairment. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 2,914 Evidence: high
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The likelihood of amyloid positivity was associated with age and APOE ε4 status. 3 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 377 Evidence: high
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Among persons with early Alzheimer's disease, the use of gantenerumab led to a lower amyloid plaque burden than placebo at 116 weeks but was not associated with slower clinical decline. 2 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 980 Evidence: low
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The first single-stage individual patient data meta-analysis from randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials provides evidence to support benefits of antihypertensive treatment in late-mid and later life to lower the risk of dementia. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 28,008 Evidence: high
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Antihypertensive use was associated with decreased AD but not non-AD risk throughout late life. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 31,250 Evidence: moderate
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The APOE ε4 carriers and noncarriers were not significantly different at baseline (except for serum cholesterol level). 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,260 Evidence: high
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Our analysis suggests that previous estimates of dementia burden, based on smaller datasets, might have underestimated the burden of dementia in China. 1 key finding →
Design: systematic review Participants: 340,247 Evidence: high
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Liraglutide, a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonist and antidiabetic drug, has shown neuroprotective effects in animal models. 3 key findings →
Design: phase-2-trial Participants: 204 Evidence: null result
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Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a complex disorder characterised by a broad range of clinical manifestations, differential pathological signatures, and genetic variability. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,526 Evidence: high
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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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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
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Observational epidemiological studies have shown a positive association between hypertension and risk of incident dementia; however, the effects of antihypertensive therapy on cognitive function in controlled trials have been conflicting, and meta-analyses of the trials have not provided clear evidence of whether antihypertensive treatment reduces dementia incidence. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 1,687 Evidence: high
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Among older adults at risk of cognitive decline and dementia, a structured, higher-intensity intervention had a statistically significant greater benefit on global cognition compared with an unstructured, self-guided intervention. 5 key findings →
Participants: 1,056 Evidence: high
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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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Fifty-one AD patients enrolled, mean age 73.5. 4 key findings →
Design: clinical trial Evidence: high
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Baseline and 3-month visit data were available for 272 participants in arm 1 and 260 in arm 2 (median [IQR] age: 71 [65-77] and 71 [65-77] years; 150/272 male [55%] and 135/260 male [52%]; 122/272 female [45%] and 125/260 female [48%]; median [IQR] education: 12 [10-15] and 13 [10-16] years, respectively). 3 key findings →
Participants: 844 Evidence: high
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Amyloid-beta 42 (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) reflect core features of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) more directly than clinical diagnosis. 2 key findings →
Participants: 8,074 Evidence: low
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We found that more intensive follow-up of individuals in a placebo-controlled clinical trial of Ginkgo biloba for treating mild-moderate dementia resulted in a better outcome than minimal follow-up, as measured by their cognitive functioning. 4 key findings →
Participants: 140 Evidence: high
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Survivors of a traumatic brain injury can deteriorate years later, developing brain atrophy and dementia. 4 key findings →
Evidence: low
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A distribution-based approach using data included in a systematic review approximated known MCIDs. 3 key findings →
Design: systematic review Participants: 12,449 Evidence: high
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(18)F-Flutemetamol performs similarly to the (11)C-PIB parent molecule within the same subjects and provides high test-retest replicability and potentially much wider accessibility for clinical and research use. 3 key findings →
Evidence: low
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Dementia is a heterogeneous neurodegenerative disease, whose etiology results from a complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 76 Evidence: high
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This study found that CSF-based estimates using adjusted data-driven cutoffs were up to 10% higher than PET-based estimates in people without dementia, whereas the results were similar among people with dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 97 Evidence: moderate
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White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. 1 key finding →
Evidence: moderate
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 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 →