Living with dementia magazine December 2012/January 2013

Funding dementia research for over two decades has allowed the Society to contribute to real improvements in people's lives. Digital Research Officer Débora Miranda reports on past achievements and future plans.

Alzheimer's Society has funded dementia research since 1990. An investment of £20 million in this since then has contributed to the improvement of the lives of people affected by dementia and the development of better treatments.

Over the past 20 years we have funded research into the cause, cure, care and prevention of all forms of dementia, using a range of techniques from laboratory-based science to social interventions. Alzheimer's Society is the only UK charity to fund such wide-ranging dementia research. 

We have awarded over 100 research grants, including research fellowships, PhD studentships and project grants. These have resulted in over 250 research publications, which have been referred to in turn by 7,500 articles in scientific journals.

The Society translates the findings of our research into real benefits for people living with dementia, for example through policy and campaigns.

Causes of dementia

Overall, almost 40 per cent of our research investment has been in studying the changes in the brain that cause dementia. This is critical to the development of new drugs and therapies.

A decade ago, we awarded a research fellowship to Dr Amritpal Mudher to develop a new way to understand Alzheimer's disease by looking at fruit flies. This enabled her to explore how the disease develops in the brains of a living animal rather than in petri dishes.

She says,

'I have developed this and similar models over the last 10 years, and with the help of my small research team (again funded by generous grants from the Society) have gained insight into how nerve cells could be getting "sick" in the brains of people with the disease.'

Diagnosis and treatment

Diagnosis is another essential area of research, and in the late 1990s Professor Nick Fox and fellow scientists proved that MRI brain scans can detect changes in the volume of the brain. Today this is a recommended technique to diagnose early changes in dementia.

Over 20 years, four new drugs have been licensed for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Research funded by the Society has been important in determining the stage of the disease when these drugs are most effective.

Following Dr Mudher's initial research into causes, she says,

'We have also successfully tested a number of drugs in our fly models, some of which were later put through clinical trials in people with Alzheimer's disease.'

Support and public health

Around 90 per cent of people with dementia will eventually experience behavioural and psychological symptoms such as aggression and hallucinations. There are few treatment options and people have often been given antipsychotic drugs, despite their limited success and severe side-effects.

The Society funded a training programme for care home staff that was found to reduce the inappropriate use of antipsychotic drugs. We are now leading a national initiative to roll this out to 150 care homes across the UK.

Public health is our youngest area of research and we have funded a trial to prevent development of vascular dementia, confirming that stroke and hypertension increase risk.

A partnership with the BBC enabled us to tell how lifestyle factors can affect people's chances of developing dementia. While alcohol use and obesity in mid-life are likely to increase the risk, there is not enough evidence to say whether oily fish or vitamin supplements help in this.

Investing in the future

More than 500 scientists and our Research Advisory Committee oversee the Society's research programme. Importantly, over 200 Research Network volunteers help to review grant applications, monitor funded projects and communicate their findings. In the last year, they gave over 9,500 hours of their time and provided 4,160 personal reviews of research proposals.

For the next five years, we aim to increase our annual investment in research to more than £10 million. Through this we will attract more young scientists to this fascinating yet underfunded field and build the dementia research community of the future.

From her initial fellowship grant, Amritpal now leads a lab and is the principle investigator on a variety of projects, some of which are also funded by the Society.

She says,

'The longer I spend working with these models, the more I learn about them and hence my experience and expertise in using them grows. My team uses these models to test drugs that could protect affected nerve cells and thus be considered for treatment of Alzheimer's in future years.'

Download our latest report Cause, cure, care and prevention: Impact of Alzheimer’s Society’s dementia research programme 1990–2012.

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