Get help now — free helplines

You can call any of these for free. You do not need a diagnosis, an appointment, or a crisis to call — questions and plain exhaustion are reasons enough.

  • Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline 800-272-3900 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Free, confidential support and information for people with dementia, caregivers, families and the public. Master's-level clinicians. Also Spanish.
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 988 24/7 Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. For anyone in emotional distress or a mental-health crisis, including caregivers.
  • Alzheimer's Foundation of America (AFA) Helpline 866-232-8484 9:00 am - 9:00 pm ET, seven days a week Licensed social workers providing support, info and referrals. Also text message and web chat. Text: 646-586-5283

In a medical emergency, call 911. More numbers, and what each line does, on the help page.

Find studies

A note on reading research. One study is rarely the final word.

We try to note the size of a study, whether it was in humans or animals, and how early-stage the finding is. If a summary here doesn't make that clear, treat it with extra caution and check the original source.

Several promising plasma biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease have been recently developed, but their neuropathological correlates have not yet been fully determined. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 105 Evidence: moderate

Cerebrospinal fluid tau, neurogranin, and neurofilament light in Alzheimer's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 67 out of 100. EMBO molecular medicine 2016-10-04

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tau (total tau, T-tau), neurofilament light (NFL), and neurogranin (Ng) are potential biomarkers for neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 3 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 93 Evidence: moderate

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a multi-system disease characterized primarily by progressive muscle weakness. 2 key findings →

Design: longitudinal study Participants: 327 Evidence: moderate

The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease at 25 years

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 61 out of 100. EMBO Molecular Medicine 2016-03-29

Despite continuing debate about the amyloid β-protein (or Aβ hypothesis, new lines of evidence from laboratories and clinics worldwide support the concept that an imbalance between production and clearance of Aβ42 and related Aβ peptides is a very early, often initiating factor in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 5 key findings →

Evidence: low

TREM2 is an innate immune receptor expressed on the surface of microglia. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: low

PET, CSF and plasma biomarkers of tau pathology may be differentially associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related demographic, cognitive, genetic and neuroimaging markers. 3 key findings →

Participants: 400 Evidence: low

Microglial activation occurs early in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and previous studies reported both detrimental and protective effects of microglia on AD progression. 4 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 70 Evidence: moderate

Failures in Alzheimer's disease (AD) drug trials highlight the need to further explore disease mechanisms and alterations of biomarkers during the development of AD. 3 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Participants: 377 Evidence: low

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), tau phosphorylation in the brain and its subsequent release into cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood is a dynamic process that changes during disease evolution. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) is essential for the transition of homeostatic microglia to a disease-associated microglial state. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Sequence variations occurring in the gene encoding the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) support an essential function of microglia and innate immunity in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Polygenic risk scores have identified that genetic variants without genome-wide significance still add to the genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). 2 key findings →

Evidence: low

Amyloid blood biomarker detects Alzheimer's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 52 out of 100. EMBO molecular medicine 2018-05-01

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is currently incurable, but there is general agreement that a minimally invasive blood biomarker for screening in preclinical stages would be crucial for future therapy. 5 key findings →

Design: cross-sectional Evidence: moderate

Microglia adopt numerous fates with homeostatic microglia (HM) and a microglial neurodegenerative phenotype (MGnD) representing two opposite ends. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

We have characterised the proteolytic cleavage events responsible for the shedding of triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) from primary cultures of human macrophages, murine microglia and TREM2-expressing human embryonic kidney (HEK293) cells. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

High-affinity interactions and signal transduction between Aβ oligomers and TREM2

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 50 out of 100. EMBO molecular medicine 2018-11-01

Rare coding variants in the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) are associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but how they confer this risk remains uncertain. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Alteration of the microRNA network during the progression of Alzheimer's disease

✓ Peer-reviewed alzhub usefulness score 50 out of 100. EMBO Molecular Medicine 2013-09-09

An overview of miRNAs altered in Alzheimer's disease (AD) was established by profiling the hippocampus of a cohort of 41 late-onset AD (LOAD) patients and 23 controls, showing deregulation of 35 miRNAs. 1 key finding →

Participants: 49 Evidence: moderate

Intronic GGGGCC repeat expansions in C9orf72 are the most common known cause of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which are characterised by degeneration of cortical and motor neurons, respectively. 2 key findings →

Evidence: low

Progranulin (PGRN) is predominantly expressed by microglia in the brain, and genetic and experimental evidence suggests a critical role in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are neurodegenerative diseases with overlap in clinical presentation, neuropathology, and genetic underpinnings. 4 key findings →

Evidence: low

CSF Aβ42/Aβ40 contributed most to identify Aβ-positivity, while continuous Aβ-PET load within the positive range was best predicted by plasma P-tau217. 1 key finding →

Participants: 1,053 Evidence: low

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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 →

Newest studies, as a dated timeline →    Atom feed