28,180 Alzheimer's and dementia studies in plain English, each scored out of 100.
Longitudinal changes in motor function may be useful in the early detection of dementia during preclinical stages, when the utility of disease-modifying therapies would be greatest. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
These findings support previous contentions that a "preclinical phase" of detectable cognitive deficits can precede the clinical diagnosis of probable AD by many years, and they also support the hypothesis that problems with secondary verbal memory are among the first signs of AD. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 1,045 Evidence: moderate
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Preclinical AD as detected by PET PiB is not benign, as it is associated with progression to symptomatic AD. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Twenty-two percent of the participants aged 75 years or older had MCI. 2 key findings →
Participants: 927 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Smaller hippocampi and specifically CA1 and subicular involvement are associated with increased risk for conversion from MCI to AD. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Evidence: moderate
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Interferon-gamma-inducible protein 10 is specifically increased in MCI and seems to decrease with the progression of AD, whereas MCP-1 and IL-8 are up-regulated also in late stages of the disease, suggesting a role in phases in which neurodegeneration is prevalent. 3 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 36 Evidence: moderate
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We used a sensitive and specific beta-site amyloid precursor protein (APP)-cleaving enzyme 1 (BACE1) assay to determine the relationship between BACE1 activity in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and markers of APP metabolism and axonal degeneration in early and late stages of Alzheimer disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 113 Evidence: moderate
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There is a clear need to develop an objective diagnostic test for Alzheimer disease (AD). 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 123 Evidence: low
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of Abeta peptide 1-42 (Abeta 42), tau, and phosphorylated tau (ptau) are potential biomarkers of Alzheimer disease. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Participants: 49 Evidence: moderate
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A larger WHR may be related to neurodegenerative, vascular, or metabolic processes that affect brain structures underlying cognitive decline and dementia. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 112 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Trajectories of Aβ42 level in CSF, FDG uptake, and hippocampal volume vary across different cognitive stages. 3 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 819 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Clinicians accurately predicted AD pathological findings or their absence in most cases. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 151 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Persons with MCI also have impaired motor function, and the degree of impairment in lower extremity function is related to the risk of AD. 1 key finding →
Design: cohort study Participants: 558 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Elevated midlife blood pressures, and the resulting increased white matter hyperintensities, increase the risk for MCI in a group of community-dwelling older men to at least the same degree as apolipoprotein E4 genotype. 5 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Depression symptoms before the onset of AD are associated with the development of AD, even in families where first depression symptoms occurred more than 25 years before the onset of AD. 4 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 1,953 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Ascertainment of the -synuclein level in CSF somewhat improves the differential diagnosis of AD vs DLB and PDD when combined with established AD biomarkers. 3 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Participants: 453 Evidence: low
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These initial data suggest that serum protein-based biomarkers can be combined with clinical information to accurately classify AD. 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 197 Evidence: high
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Lipid-lowering agent use was associated with a lower risk of dementia, and specifically of Alzheimer disease, in those younger than 80 years. 5 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 492 Evidence: moderate
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Stroke is associated with AD among elderly individuals. 4 key findings →
Design: longitudinal study Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Elevations in plasma Abeta(42) peptide levels are associated with earlier onset of AD and increased risk of death. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 204 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source Free full text
Phosphorylation of tau protein at threonine 231 (using full-length tau, 441 amino acids, for the numbering scheme) (p-tau(231)) occurs specifically in postmortem brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) and can be sensitively detected in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). 4 key findings →
Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low
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Most prognostic studies on Parkinson disease have been hospital based or have applied register-based case-finding methods. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 6,969 Evidence: moderate
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Alzheimer disease-specific cortical thinning and hippocampal volume loss are consistent with a sigmoidal pattern, with an acceleration phase during the early stages of the disease. 2 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 317 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Models combining multiple risk factors should refine the prediction of questionable dementia and persistent cognitive impairment, harbingers of dementia. 4 key findings →
Design: cohort study Participants: 48 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
Alzheimer's disease case patients were significantly less likely than control subjects to use estrogen replacement (7% vs 18%), but groups did not differ with regard to the total number of prescription medications or to the most frequently prescribed class of drug (thyroid medication). 3 key findings →
Design: case-control study Participants: 143 Evidence: moderate
Full summary, score breakdown and related studies → Original source
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 →