The month in cognitive neurology

Search terms

Condition concepts were combined with the following topic concepts and adapted to the syntax of each source:

Diagnosis: diagnos* OR biomarker* OR neuroimaging OR PET OR MRI OR CSF OR plasma OR genetic* OR criteria OR "differential diagnosis" OR screening

Treatment and prevention: treat* OR therap* OR intervention* OR "clinical trial" OR random* OR pharmacolog* OR non-pharmacolog* OR prevention OR safety OR efficacy

Alzheimer’s disease

"Alzheimer disease" OR Alzheimer*

Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy

"cerebral amyloid angiopathy" OR CAA

Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson* AND (cognit* OR dementia OR "differential diagnosis")

Dementia with Lewy bodies

"dementia with Lewy bodies" OR DLB OR "Lewy body dementia"

Multiple system atrophy

"multiple system atrophy" OR MSA

Progressive supranuclear palsy

"progressive supranuclear palsy" OR PSP

Corticobasal degeneration

"corticobasal degeneration" OR CBD

Corticobasal syndrome

"corticobasal syndrome" OR CBS

Frontotemporal dementia

"frontotemporal dementia" OR "frontotemporal lobar degeneration" OR FTD OR FTLD OR "behavioural variant frontotemporal" OR "behavioral variant frontotemporal" OR bvFTD

Primary progressive aphasias

"primary progressive aphasia" OR "primary progressive aphasias" OR PPA

Vascular cognitive impairment

"vascular cognitive impairment" OR "vascular cognitive decline" OR "vascular dementia"

Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD)

"Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" OR CJD OR "prion disease"

Normal pressure hydrocephalus

"normal pressure hydrocephalus" OR NPH

Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE)

"limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy" OR "LATE-NC"

Primary age-related tauopathy (PART)

"primary age-related tauopathy" OR PART

Argyrophilic grain disease

"argyrophilic grain disease" OR "argyrophilic grains"

Functional cognitive decline

"functional cognitive decline" OR "functional cognitive disorder" OR FCD

Journals reviewed

Article selection criteria

• New publications within the surveillance period addressing diagnosis, differential diagnosis, primary or secondary prevention, or treatment of an eligible condition.
• Biomarkers, neuroimaging, diagnostic genetics, clinical criteria, pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions, clinical trials, and treatment safety or efficacy.
• Parkinson’s disease research only when cognition, cognitive impairment, dementia, or a relevant differential diagnosis is a substantial focus.
• Rare adult leukoencephalopathies and genetic dementias, including CSF1R-related leukoencephalopathy, CADASIL, the adult leukodystrophies, Niemann-Pick type C, Kufs disease, FXTAS, cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis, Wilson disease and mitochondrial disorders with cognitive involvement. They are uncommon, frequently mistaken for commoner diagnoses, and several are treatable.
• Review articles from any journal under surveillance, not only the review-focused titles; they are labelled and classified under Review so a synthesis is never presented as new data.
• Clinically substantive letters, editorials, comments, or correspondence may be retained, but must be explicitly labelled by publication type and classified under Others; they are not treated as original research.

• Publications without a substantial connection to cognition, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment.
• Letters, editorials, comments, or correspondence without a substantive clinical contribution.
• Duplicate records identified using DOI, PMID, and normalized title.
• Animal and cellular studies. This version of the report is restricted to human research.
• Mechanistic research without a clear clinical diagnostic, preventive or therapeutic application.
• General Parkinson’s disease treatment research with no cognitive relevance.
• Articles from the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, excluded because its publication volume makes the monthly report impractically large.
• Articles from the cognitive neuroscience titles retired from surveillance on 15 August 2026: NeuroImage, Human Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, Cortex, Neuropsychologia, Neuropsychology, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain and Cognition, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, Neuropsychology Review, Trends in Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. They publish research on the healthy brain more often than research that changes a consultation, and in the July 2026 run they supplied 15 of the 58 articles left to review without a single priority suggestion.
• Alzforum news items, which belong in a separate news tab and are not counted as scientific articles.

Search terms retrieve candidates. Matching a keyword is not sufficient for inclusion: the decision depends on clinical relevance after title-and-abstract screening, with the full text consulted when necessary and available.

Key findings: at most 5 key findings are selected on clinical impact, novelty or advance, evidence strength, field significance, timeliness. Selected after eligibility, from the articles that already qualify, in two stages: an article must first meet at least one key trigger — practice-changing, pivotal therapeutic, diagnostic or biomarker advance, safety, guideline or consensus, mechanistic, controversy-resolving, or a genuinely new direction — and only then is the strength of its evidence weighed. Key status is not an eligibility criterion. A maximum, not a quota, and judged against what else appeared in the same month. A month with fewer consequential findings publishes fewer, and none are promoted to fill the space.