The UK spends more than £30 million every day treating and caring for patients who have dementia.
This enormous pot of money is what’s needed to cover everything from the drugs that ease symptoms to the personal care needed by the country’s 850,000 dementia patients.
To put this in perspective, the daily bill for other major diseases is around £14 million for cancer, £8 million for stroke and £6.8 million for heart disease. Dementia costs more than all three combined.
It would be reasonable, therefore, to expect a similar breakdown in the way research funding is carved up.
But according to a study by Oxford University, dementia receives a fraction of the sum allocated to cancer research and less than that awarded to heart disease — even though, in 2016, dementia became the leading cause of death in the UK, claiming more than 70,000 lives.
According to a study by Oxford University, dementia receives a fraction of the sum allocated to cancer research (stock photo)
The researchers looked at how an annual amount of £856 million of funding — cash provided by the Government and charities — was split. Nearly two-thirds (£544 million) was handed to scientists working on potential cancer treatments and around 20 per cent (£166 million) was allocated to heart disease research.
Dementia was awarded a mere 11 per cent of the pot (£90 million).
Scientific expertise follows money, so since dementia has been starved of research cash, it has also been denied the skilled workforce it requires.
For every four scientists in the UK working on potential cancer cures, there is only one doing the same in dementia.
This shortage of resources, some say, partly explains why the search for new treatments is littered with failures.
A succession of promising new therapies designed to tackle brain deposits called amyloid plaques — thought to be a major factor in Alzheimer’s disease — flopped.
‘This is what happens when you don’t have enough investment,’ says Dr David Reynolds, chief scientific officer of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
‘You have to decide what is the best option available on which to spend your limited resources.
‘In dementia, that was amyloid-lowering drugs. But there have been no effective drugs produced from all that research.’
So why is dementia so badly neglected? Partly to blame, say experts, is the misplaced perception that it is an inevitable part of ageing, so not worthy of cash.
Ageing is the major risk factor for the disease, but there is nothing inevitable about it, says Dr Reynolds. ‘Dementia is at the stage where heart disease was in the Seventies, or cancer was in the Nineties,’ he explains.
‘It was then they saw major investments in research funding that led to breakthrough medicines many years later.’
Things are improving. As Prime Minister, David Cameron set scientists the challenge of coming up with a cure by 2025. Since then, Government funding for research has doubled to more than £60 million a year.
A further £250 million — from charities and the Medical Research Council — has been invested in a new UK Dementia Research Institute, based at University College London.
But some fear science is trying to come up with a cure for a disease it still doesn’t understand.
Dr James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, says: ‘Most of the money went into amyloid-lowering molecules because they were judged the best candidates.
‘But perhaps we’ve not spent enough time or money understanding the natural progression of the disease.
‘We now know that when you start to show symptoms, dementia has been developing for 20 years. That’s when we should go in with a drug.’
Dr Pickett say around one in three cases of dementia is potentially preventable — mainly through lifestyle modifications such as a healthy diet.
‘Yet the amount of research into prevention of dementia is pitiful — it’s a travesty.’
There are around 80 dementia drugs in phase two or three trials (being tested on patients). ‘But the pipeline for new cancer treatments has over 1,000 new drugs,’ says Dr Reynolds.
Even if a new treatment is discovered, Hilda Hayo, chief executive of the charity Dementia UK, warns: ‘There are 200 different types of dementia. A “magic pill” won’t help everyone. ‘In the meantime, 850,000 people living with the disease need more help and support now.’