Ann Neurol 2018;84:737-748. 1 key finding →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 443 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Research
27,380 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
In a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study, we investigated whether statins alter cholesterol metabolites and reduce Abeta levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of 44 patients with Alzheimer's disease. 2 key findings →
Participants: 44 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Adherence to a Mediterranean diet may contribute to the prevention of a series of brain diseases; this may be of special value given the aging of Western societies. 4 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
75/100
This large GWAS of WMH burden in community-based cohorts of individuals of European descent identifies a novel locus on chromosome 17. 5 key findings →
Design: meta-analysis Participants: 3,024 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
APOE4 confers greater AD risk in women. 5 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 5,496 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Impaired odor identification, particularly in the anosmic range, is associated with increased mortality in older adults even after controlling for dementia and medical comorbidity. 3 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Donepezil is safe and well tolerated. 1 key finding →
Design: clinical trial Participants: 35 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
72/100
These findings suggest that the plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 may be useful in identifying individuals with very low levels of amyloid pathology, whereas p-tau, GFAP, and NfL may be useful in staging disease progression. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 784 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
71/100
(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
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
Combining plasma p-tau with Aβ42 or the Aβ42/40 ratio reduced the intermediate zone. 5 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 326 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neuropathology cases included 46 Parkinson's disease and 10 dementia with Lewy bodies, and clinical cases included 173 Parkinson's disease, and 64 controls. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 46 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Neuropathology was ubiquitous, with 94% of participants having 1+, 78% having 2+, 58% having 3+, and 35% having 4+. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,079 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Subjects were 404 persons in the Religious Orders Study, a cohort study of aging, who underwent annual clinical evaluations, including 19 neuropsychological tests from which 5 cognitive domain and global summary scores were derived, and brain autopsy at time-of-death (mean age-at-death 86). 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 404 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
We found that a higher PGS was associated with higher rates of tau-PET accumulation, in particular at elevated amyloid-PET levels. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 85 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
67/100
CSF A beta(1-42) was the most sensitive biomarker for AD in the autopsy cohort of CSF samples: receiver operating characteristic area under the curve of 0.913 and sensitivity for AD detection of 96.4%. 4 key findings →
Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
PSMD is a new, fully automated, and robust imaging marker for SVD. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 113 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
A substantial proportion of the relationship between education and dementia was mediated through mid-life vascular risk factors. 2 key findings →
Design: cohort Participants: 13,368 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Higher concentrations of serum biomarkers were associated with the development of clinical AD; especially, the time-specific associations were notable: t-tau 8 to 16 years, and Nf-L and GFAP 4 to 8 years prior to clinical AD. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,327 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Mediation analyses proposed that visceral obesity contributes to deep white matter lesions through increases in proinflammatory cytokines, suggesting a pathomechanistic link. 1 key finding →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,825 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Previously published community- or population-based studies of brain aging and dementia with autopsy were restricted to a single sex, a single ethnic group, Roman Catholic clergy, or focused pathological assessments. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 221 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Full text may need a subscription
The pathologic indices of Alzheimer disease, cerebrovascular disease, and Lewy body disease accumulate in the brains of older persons with and without dementia, but the extent to which they account for late life cognitive decline remains unknown. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 856 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
This longitudinal quantitative magnetic resonance imaging study of 24 patients with mild temporal lobe epilepsy shows an ipsilateral hippocampal volume decrease of 9% (range, -30 to +0.5%; p = 0.002, paired t test) over a period of 3.5 +/- 0.7 years. 2 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 24 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
We found that common variation at the CR1 locus has a broad impact on cognition and that this effect is largely mediated by an individual's amyloid plaque burden. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 1,666 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Olfaction and color vision identify early-stage synuclein-mediated neurodegenerative diseases. 3 key findings →
Design: prospective cohort Participants: 64 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
PM2.5 exposure may contribute to WM loss in older women. 2 key findings →
Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Where “Free full text” comes from
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
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 27,380 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.
What this library is — and isn't
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 →