MRC Dementias Platform

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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.