Dementia could have an effective treatment within a decade, a senior doctor claimed yesterday.
The treatment could "cure" or significantly slow down the disease, according to Professor Alistair Burns, national clinical director for dementia.
He spoke as new figures showed a big increase in the number of people diagnosed with dementia.
The government has made diagnosis a key objective – but a scheme to reward GPs for identifying patients proved controversial.
About 10,000 people a month are now being diagnosed, NHS England said. By the end of December there were 394,000 known cases compared with 250,000 in 2009.
Professor Burns said: “If I look back at the advances that have been made during the time that I have been interested in dementia, and in particularly the last few years and the Prime Minister’s support for dementia and research in general, it has really been extraordinarily helpful at getting people interested in the subject.
“I would say in confidence that we are on target to develop something that will cure or significantly slow down dementia in the next 10 years, but these things are notoriously hard to predict.”
He added: “We are really at the beginning of the journey on dementia in terms of research and although there have been huge strides, it is going to take a little while to catch up with the interest and developments there have been with cancer.”
Professor Burns said: “Many clinicians share the view that because there isn’t a pill, because there isn’t one thing we can do, there is the feeling that perhaps there is no point looking for a diagnosis.
“So part of the work we are doing in NHS England working with colleagues such as the royal colleges and the British Medical Association is to dispel the myth that there isn’t anything you can do.
“I think that is the beginnings of us trying to understand why we are not diagnosing as many people as we could."
Leave a Reply