Barcelona and Madrid occupy second and third place, behind London, in the European ranking of cities in scientific production on Alzheimer's, according to a study by the bibliometrics company Research Marks Analytics. Both cities are in the top ten of the world ranking, led by New York and Boston, with Barcelona in seventh position and Madrid in tenth.
"The data places Spain as one of the leading countries in research on dementia and Alzheimer's on a global scale," says the study, not yet published, to which La Vanguardia has had access.
The work is based on data from the 2017-2021 five-year period extracted from the PubMed medical research search engine, reports Raul Méndez-Vásquez, a Research Marks Analytics data analyst and one of its authors. Using PubMed information, multiple types of data can be analyzed about research published in nearly 5,000 scientific journals.
The study, commissioned by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and financed by the Ministry of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, is the first to separately analyze bibliometric information on dementia and Alzheimer's.
The results show that 1,413 publications on Alzheimer's published between 2017 and 2021 have scientists working in Spanish institutions as authors or co-authors, which represents 5.2% of the world's scientific production on the disease.
Barcelona, with 540 works, and Madrid, with 525, lead the Spanish production. They are ahead of other European cities with notable activity in the area of neurosciences such as Stockholm (514 articles on Alzheimer's), Amsterdam (479) or Paris (476).
“We have a first-class international scientific ecosystem in the field of Alzheimer's, which is something we suspected and that we now see endorsed with data”, declares Arcadi Navarro, director of the Fundació Pasqual Maragall. The number of researchers who have published papers on Alzheimer's in the five-year period analyzed is 718 in Barcelona and 854 in Madrid.
According to Navarro, "Barcelona stands out especially in clinical research and prevention, with very active participation in clinical trials, while Madrid perhaps stands out more in molecular and cellular biology research" that helps to better understand the disease.
The Research Marks Analytics study shows that 67% of the research on Alzheimer's in which Barcelona has participated, and 56% of those in Madrid, have been carried out in collaboration with scientific institutions from other countries. These figures are comparable to those of other cities in Europe, and higher than those of the United States and China.
But international collaborations do not imply that Spanish scientists have a secondary role in Alzheimer's projects. They lead, or more often co-lead, research in a similar percentage to scientists from other countries. Specifically, 85% of the research in which Madrid has participated and 83% of those in Barcelona are led or co-led by local scientists, percentages similar to those of New York (80%), Boston (79%) or London. (82%).
An analysis of the impact of the research, which is calculated from the number of times each article is cited in the scientific literature, places the quality of the Spanish scientific production on Alzheimer's at a level comparable to that of the United States, France or Sweden, although somewhat lower than in the United Kingdom.
"The good data in Barcelona is explained by the dynamics of collaboration between hospitals, universities and research centers, and also by the impact of pioneering figures who promoted Alzheimer's research such as Rafael Blesa [Sant Pau Hospital], Mercè Boada [ Fundación ACE] or Pasqual Maragall himself", highlights Arcadi Navarro, who was secretary of Universities and Research of the Generalitat before joining the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.
Starting from this base, Navarro advocates “promoting greater coordination between research groups and facilitating the attraction of talent to work in the field of Alzheimer's. It is something in which the City Council, the Generalitat and the State can play an important role and in which the Fundació Pasqual Maragall is willing to help” as much as it can.
