What this is, and how to read it
A living literature review of the Alzheimer's corpus, arranged along the disease's proposed fifty-year timeline. This page says plainly what these documents are — and what they are not.
Which disease we mean
Two words in this project's name do different jobs. Adult cognitive disease is the wide frame — dementia as it is actually encountered, in brains that at autopsy usually carry more than one pathology: Alzheimer changes alongside TDP-43, Lewy bodies, small-vessel disease, hippocampal sclerosis. That is the population medicine has to treat. Alzheimer's disease, when this corpus discusses mechanism, means something narrower: the biologically defined entity of the NIA-AA framework — amyloid-positive and tau-positive, of typical topography. The three-phase architecture described here is a proposed account of that narrower entity, and it is worth stating plainly what the narrowing costs. Depending on how many pathologies a study scores, pure or near-pure Alzheimer's is between 3 and 22 per cent of dementia, most plausibly 10 to 15. Claims made here about Alzheimer's are therefore not claims about dementia. Nor does adopting the amyloid–tau definition concede that amyloid and tau are the disease's causes: it settles which patients we are describing, not what drives them. Where this corpus parts company with the field is on what, inside those patients, is load-bearing — and that is argued in the papers, not assumed in the definition.
A map, not a verdict
This wiki collects 123 research documents, 634 interlinked concepts and 7 convergence nodes, drawn from the 2022 Oskar Fischer Prize submissions and the wider literature. They are arranged along a proposed three-phase, fifty-year model of the disease — but that arrangement is a reading of the evidence, not the settled clinical staging of Alzheimer's. The phase boundaries, and the causal bridges between them, are hypotheses.
Organic Network Synthesis
The corpus was assembled by a method its authors call Organic Network Synthesis. The idea is to ingest primary sources across disciplines and decades — from the 1907 neuropathology of Oskar Fischer to molecular papers of 2024 — to look for the mechanistic overlaps that hyper-specialised fields miss, and to model the result as a network of relationships rather than a ranked list of theories. The intended product is a map. The three-phase “Temporal Architecture of Collapse” is the most prominent path drawn across that map — one synthesis it yields, not the ground truth of the field.
What these documents are
Every thesis here is an AI-assisted deep-research synthesis of the published literature, prepared under that method. Each one connects and interprets primary sources, and each claim is tethered to a citation. They are not peer-reviewed, and they have not been endorsed by the scientists whose work they interpret. Read them as a densely-referenced argument to be checked against its sources — which is precisely the project's stated invitation: challenge the connections, bring new data, help refine the model.
How to read the confidence
The corpus does not pretend every link is equally certain. 16 of its theses carry an internal validity ledger that grades their own claims — either on a plain scale (Strong · Moderate · Weak) or on a four-tier one: Tier I, established in human tissue; Tier II, a bridging inference; Tier III–IV, conjectural. Where a paper has one, its sidebar shows a Self-graded validity ledger ↓ link straight to that section. And papers the framework has since outgrown carry an “earlier framing” or “superseded” banner pointing to what now carries the argument.
Where to start
If you are new here, read the one paper that frames the rest — The Temporal Architecture of Collapse — then walk the timeline from the overview. The full method, and the intellectual history behind it, live on the companion site, AdultCognitiveDisease.com.