MRC Dementias Platform

痴呆症是我们面临的最大健康问题之一，也是世界各国政府关注的主要问题。最近的研究表明，导致痴呆症的疾病过程始于中年，甚至更早。这表明，最好在痴呆症开始影响日常生活之前就开发出可以使用的治疗方法。然而，识别这些早期的变化是非常困难的。为了更容易地发现早期变化，我们想为痴呆症研究人员创建一个“一站式服务”。我们认为这将在几个方面有所帮助：它将使科学家和工业界结成伙伴关系。这将引导我们的科学努力，帮助更有效地开发新的治疗方法。2. 这将减少失败的风险。研究早期痴呆症的一个主要问题是找到合适的研究对象。如果一个人患有痴呆症，那就太晚了，如果他们永远不会得到它，那就是浪费时间。为了克服这个问题，我们将详细测量大量表面上健康的人，以确定哪些人出现了早期变化的迹象。3. 这将加快发现的速度。我们将汇集并分享英国所有主要痴呆症相关研究的结果和见解，以便我们更好地了解将我们的努力放在哪里。例如，我们将能够快速识别目标机制，例如，在一组有许多痴呆症病例的老年人中，看看我们是否能在新招募的队列中发现的早期变化的年轻人中找到相同的机制。为了实现这些目标，将所有可用的信息结合起来是不容易的，因此我们将开发一个强大的计算和信息集成基础设施，以确保数据和分析数据的能力对代表许多专业学科的广泛科学家来说是可用的和可访问的。这个项目引发了一些棘手的伦理问题。例如，如果他们表现出早期变化，你应该告诉他们什么？然而，如果我们要解决痴呆症问题，就必须面对这些问题。使用这些方法，我们认为痴呆症的影响可以大大减少。即使我们无法完全阻止产生痴呆症的潜在机制，通过找到减缓痴呆症的方法，并通过尽早应用这些治疗，我们中的大多数人可能永远不会真正遭受痴呆症的侮辱，即使我们的“心算”不再像以前那样。

Dementia is one of the biggest health issues that we face and is a major concern for governments around the world. Recent studies have shown that the disease processes which underlie dementia begin in middle age if not before. This suggests that it is better to develop treatments that can be used long before dementia begins to affect daily life. However, identifying these early changes is very difficult.To make detecting early changes easier, we want to create a 'one-stop-shop' for dementia researchers. We think this will help in several ways:1. It will bring scientists and industry together in partnership. This will direct our scientific efforts in ways that will help develop new treatments more efficiently. 2. It will reduce the risk of failure. A major problem in studying the early stages of dementia is finding the right people to study. It's too late if a person has dementia and it's a waste of time if they won't ever get it. To overcome this problem we will measure in detail large numbers of apparently healthy people to identify those who are showing signs of early change. 3. It will enable quicker discovery. We will bring together and share results and insights from all the major dementia related studies in the UK so that we know have a better idea of where to put our effort. For example, we will be able to rapidly identify target mechanisms in, for example, a cohort of older people with many dementia cases, and see if we find the same mechanisms operating in younger persons with early changes found in a newly recruited cohort.Combining all the information available to us in order to achieve these goals is not easy and so we will develop a powerful computing and information integration infrastructure to ensure that data and the ability to analyse it is available and accessible to a wide range of scientists representing many specialist disciplines.This project raises some difficult ethical issues. For example, what should you tell someone if they show early changes? However, these issues have to be faced if we are going to solve the dementia problem.Using these methods we think that the impact of dementia can be much reduced. Even if we are unable to stop the underlying mechanisms that produce dementia completely, by finding ways of slowing them down, and by applying these treatments as early as possible, it may be that most of us need never actually suffer the indignity of dementia, even if our 'mental arithmetic' is not what it once was.