Each study has a usefulness score out of 100 (rubric version 4.0). Tap a score to see what makes it up.
Highest usefulness score first. Studies without a score come last.
-
Suffering related to dementia is multifaceted because cognitive and physical functioning slowly deteriorates.
Why it matters
This review notes that some dementia risk factors, such as smoking, excessive alcohol use and poor diet, can be modified, while age and sex cannot. It highlights that the effect of conditions like obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease on dementia risk varies by sex, and that females are at greater risk of Alzheimer disease dementia while males are at greater risk of vascular dementia.
-
The two primary molecular pathologies in Alzheimer's disease are amyloid-β plaques and tau-immunoreactive neurofibrillary tangles.
Why it matters
This study examined tau deposition with a PET tracer in 41 cognitively normal and 11 cognitively impaired older adults and related it to cerebrospinal fluid markers of Alzheimer pathology. It is a small imaging study about measuring pathology, not about treating, curing, or preventing the disease.
-
Cognitive decline is one of the most frequent and disabling nonmotor features of Parkinson's disease.
Why it matters
This review of 25 years of studies on Parkinson's disease reports that no biomarker for dementia or mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease has yet been validated, though several features might be indicative. It is a review of biomarker candidates and does not show that any treatment, cure, or prevention works.
-
Cognitive decline in chronic diabetic patients is a less investigated topic.
Why it matters
This review discusses shared mechanisms such as oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and inflammation linking obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease. It is a discussion of possible mechanisms and does not report a tested treatment, cure, or prevention.
-
Vascular dementia (VaD) is recognised as a neurocognitive disorder, which is explained by numerous vascular causes in the general absence of other pathologies.
Why it matters
This 2016 review explains how vascular dementia is confirmed by examining the brain after death, and reports that tiny strokes from small vessel disease (microinfarcts) "appear to be the most robust substrates of cognitive impairment." It notes that shrinkage of the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe occurs in vascular dementia as well as in Alzheimer's, and that recent observations suggest some brain atrophy in vascular dementia is unrelated to Alzheimer pathology. It is a review with no new patient data, and it does not address treating or preventing either disease.
-
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex genetic disorder with no effective treatments.
Why it matters
This work estimates how much of Alzheimer's risk is explained by genetics and notes that the genetic architecture of the disease remains unsolved. It does not test any treatment, so it offers no direct path to treating, curing or preventing Alzheimer's.
-
The search for the genetic factors contributing to Alzheimer disease (AD) has evolved tremendously throughout the years.
Why it matters
This review describes how Alzheimer's genetics has moved from rare mutations that cause early-onset disease to many common risk genes, which could help classify patients for personalized treatment and drug trials. It notes that using this genetic information in diagnosis and risk prediction still has limitations.
-
Key points • Decreasing CBF relates to more advanced AD stages in all supratentorial regions. • The reduction of CBF does not reach a bottom level. • ASL-CBF has potential as a measure for disease progression in AD.
Why it matters
Using arterial spin-labelling imaging in 177 patients, this study found that cerebral blood flow decreased as Alzheimer's stages advanced across all supratentorial regions. The authors conclude this measure has potential for tracking disease progression, but it is a marker study and no treatment was tested.
-
53/100
In both patient groups, intrinsic connectivity between hippocampus and precuneus was significantly reduced.
Why it matters
In patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer's dementia, weaker connectivity between the hippocampus and precuneus was linked to higher glucose metabolism within the hippocampus itself. This supports the idea that lost input from other brain regions may change hippocampal activity, but it does not test any treatment.
-
Florbetaben PET shows high sensitivity and specificity for the detection of histopathology-confirmed neuritic β-amyloid plaques and may thus be a valuable adjunct to clinical diagnosis, particularly for the exclusion of AD.
Why it matters
A phase 3 study compared florbetaben PET scans with brain tissue examined after death in 74 people. Scans were read as positive in 46 of 47 cases with amyloid plaques and negative in 24 of 27 cases without, and the authors say the scan may be a valuable adjunct to clinical diagnosis, particularly for ruling out Alzheimer's disease.
-
It is recognized that individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) already demonstrate difficulty in aspects of daily functioning, which predicts disease progression.
Why it matters
This study found that informant reports of everyday function were more closely associated with objective markers of Alzheimer's disease than self-reports. The findings are about assessing functional ability and do not report on treating, curing, or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
-
Accumulating evidence implicates small vessel cerebrovascular disease, visualized as white matter hyperintensities (WMH) on T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging, in the pathogenesis and diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD).
-
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia.
Why it matters
This review argues for a 'copper subtype' of Alzheimer's, based on copper in the blood that is not bound to the protein ceruloplasmin. Such free copper is reported above normal reference values in about 50% of people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and 60% of people with Alzheimer's. The authors say meta-analyses, genetic studies and a prognostic study support this copper phenotype, which suggests a possible way to identify a subset of patients.
-
53/100
The reasons for these differences remain unclear.
Why it matters
In a long-term study of African American and Yoruba communities, the APOE4 allele was a significant risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline in both groups. However, the effect was weaker in Yoruba than in African Americans, and the reasons for this difference remain unclear.
-
The results of this study provide objective validation of the ACE-III as a screening tool for cognitive deficits in FTD and AD.
Why it matters
This study validated the ACE-III as a screening tool for cognitive deficits in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease. It is about improving detection of cognitive problems, not about treating, curing or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
-
The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between olfactory and cognitive functions in subjects affected by mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and to investigate whether olfactory deficits might reflect the likelihood of conversion from MCI to dementia.
Why it matters
This longitudinal study gave a smell identification test to 88 people with mild cognitive impairment and 46 healthy controls. It found that a pathological smell identification score at baseline was independently associated with progression to dementia within two years, suggesting smell testing may help identify high-risk patients.
-
53/100
For follow-up intervals of 2-4 years, the FCSRT-FR is more predictive than the LM-IR for identifying individuals with memory complaints who will develop incident AD.
Why it matters
In 854 people aged 70 or older who had memory complaints but no dementia, followed for about 4 years in the Einstein Aging Study (86 developed Alzheimer dementia), the free-recall score from the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test predicted who would develop Alzheimer dementia over 2–4 years better than the Wechsler Logical Memory immediate-recall test. The best cut-off scores were the same regardless of APOE ε4 status, age or education. Among APOE ε4 carriers, a low score was more likely to be correct in flagging future dementia (higher positive predictive value). This is a group-level prediction study, not a diagnostic test for individuals.
-
Two recent studies have reported the association of rs75932628-T in the TREM2 gene with the risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Why it matters
Two earlier studies had linked the rare TREM2 variant rs75932628-T (p.R47H) to Alzheimer's risk, but the authors say no independent study had yet replicated it. Genotyping 504 people with Alzheimer's and 550 healthy controls from Spain, they found the variant in 7 cases (1.4%, including 4 early-onset cases) and in none of the controls, and report this as the first positive replication in a Spanish population. The result rests on only 7 carriers, no odds ratio is given in this record, and it shows an association with risk, not that targeting TREM2 treats or prevents the disease.
-
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is increasingly recognized as a disconnection syndrome, which leads to cognitive impairment due to the disruption of functional activity across large networks or systems of interconnected brain regions.
Why it matters
In patients with severe Alzheimer's disease, functional connectivity was reduced, particularly between regions separated by greater physical distance, and loss of long-distance connectivity was associated with less efficient network topology. Similar findings were seen in mild Alzheimer's disease and amnestic mild cognitive impairment, but this describes brain changes rather than a treatment.
-
The findings support recent data indicating that the MoCA is superior to the MMSE as a global assessment tool, particularly in discerning earlier stages of cognitive decline.
Why it matters
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment was more sensitive than the Mini-Mental State Examination for telling mild cognitive impairment from healthy cognition, and adding an informant-based measure improved accuracy for both tests. This is about improving diagnosis, not about treating, curing, or preventing Alzheimer's disease.
-
Late onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) etiology is influenced by complex interactions between genetic and environmental risk factors.
Why it matters
In post-mortem parietal-lobe tissue from people with Alzheimer's and age-matched cognitively normal controls, this study looked at how ten genes flagged by large genetic studies behave in the brain. Higher ABCA7, CD33 and CR1 activity went with a worse Clinical Dementia Rating, and higher BIN1 activity went with a later age at onset. These are associations in donated brain tissue: they do not show that these genes drive the disease, or that changing them would treat or prevent it.
-
Hippocampal volumetry derived from structural MRI is increasingly used to delineate regions of interest for functional measurements, assess efficacy in therapeutic trials of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and has been endorsed by the new AD diagnostic guidelines as a radiological marker of disease progression.
Why it matters
This study compared five different labeling protocols for automatic segmentation of the hippocampus in Alzheimer's disease. It is about improving brain imaging measurement, not about treating, curing, or preventing the disease.
-
[(11)C]PIB retention in the neocortical and subcortical brain regions was significantly higher in AD patients than in age-matched controls.
Why it matters
In this multicentre study pooling 220 datasets, amyloid PET retention was significantly higher in Alzheimer's disease patients than controls, with intermediate retention in mild cognitive impairment patients showing a bimodal distribution. The study demonstrated the robustness of amyloid PET as a marker of fibrillar amyloid, but it addresses detection rather than treatment.
-
Compared with typical AD, hippocampal-sparing AD has more neurofibrillary tangles in the cortex and fewer in the hippocampus, whereas the opposite pattern is seen in limbic-predominant AD.
Why it matters
This case-control study reports that, compared with typical Alzheimer's disease, hippocampal-sparing Alzheimer's disease has more neurofibrillary tangles in the cortex and fewer in the hippocampus, while the opposite pattern is seen in limbic-predominant Alzheimer's disease. It describes differences between pathological subtypes and does not report any treatment, cure or prevention.
-
Two randomized controlled trials were included, one was scale A, and the other was scale B. The rates of abnormal liver function, withdrawal from treatment, and withdrawal due to adverse effects were higher in the treatment group (OR = 7.86, 95%CI: 2.50-24.69; OR = 4.70, 95%CI: 2.61-8.44; and OR = 5.47, 95%CI: 3.01-9.94; respectively) compared with the placebo group.
Why it matters
This review of two trials of atorvastatin found higher rates of abnormal liver function, withdrawal from treatment and withdrawal due to adverse effects in the treatment group than in the placebo group. It states that efficacy and safety need confirmation in larger, higher quality trials, so it does not show that atorvastatin treats Alzheimer's disease.
From across this topic
10 of the 5,172 studies in this topic, picked by a fixed rule (a hash of each study's address), not by score or date; each page of this list shows a different 10. The same 10 appear here every time.
- [Biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease]
- Alzheimer Hastalığının Tespiti CNN Model Sınıflandırması
- Statins Use in Alzheimer Disease: Bane or Boon from Frantic Search and Narrative Review
- Genomics of Alzheimer Disease: A Review
- Predictive utility of apolipoprotein E genotype for Alzheimer disease in outpatients with mild cognitive impairment
- Effects of multisite anodal transcranial direct current stimulation combined with cognitive stimulation in patients with Alzheimer's disease and its neurophysiological correlates: A double-blind randomized clinical trial
- Global burden of Alzheimer disease and other dementias reveals escalating geographical disparities and metabolic risks: A comprehensive analysis of 1990–2021 data
- Significant association between SCN8A and Alzheimer disease in Puerto Ricans
- Persistent Functional Impairment as an Early Indicator of Alzheimer Disease Pathology and Progression
- Survival after initial diagnosis of Alzheimer disease