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Dementia Strategy

I am grateful for this opportunity to speak about the national dementia strategy—an issue to which the House has returned on many occasions during the past few months and in which I have taken an interest over a number of years. It is now about 100 years since Alois Alzheimer first described the disease that bears his name at a medical conference in Germany. There is still no cure, and our understanding of the basic biological processes remains limited, although I will say something about current research, which is beginning to peel back some of the uncertainty and lack of knowledge. My interest in the issue does not come from personal family experience. I have been blessed in having no direct experience of family members suffering from this terrible disease. Rather, it comes from my contact with families in my constituency who are struggling with the consequences of dementia. In particular, I am grateful to have a Princess Royal Trust for Carers centre in my constituency, at Sutton. The Sutton carers' centre and the Alzheimer's Society in my constituency have played an important part in educating me about the issues and exposing me to their members who live day to day with the disease. I am a great believer in serendipity. It came as a surprise to me to learn yesterday that the Public Accounts Committee is to publish its findings today on the National Audit Office's report on dementia services. As a member of the Committee, I found our hearings in January interesting. I have a few questions from those hearings to ask the Minister today. Both the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office report areas of progress on dementia but point to what the Chairman of the Committee has described as a gulf between promise and delivery so far. Earlier this year, I was asked to write the foreword to a report published by Oxford university and the Alzheimer's Research Trust called "Dementia 2010". The report revealed a number of facts that have added to our understanding of the scale and scope of the problem and the challenge that we face. Some 820,000 people in the UK are living with dementia. The previous estimate, which is still widely quoted, was 700,000. Dementia costs the UK economy £23 billion a year; the previous estimate was £17 billion. That is twice the cost of cancer, which is £12 billion a year; three times the cost of heart disease, at £8 billion a year; and four times the cost of stroke, at £5 billion a year. The combined Government and charitable investment in dementia research—£50 million—is 12 times lower than spending on cancer research, which is £590 million a year. Heart disease receives £169 million a year and stroke research £23 million. For every £1 million in care costs resulting from dementia, £129,269 is spent on cancer research, £73,153 on heart disease research, £8,745 on stroke research and just £4,882 on dementia research. I am sure that all that will be clear when it is on the record in Hansard, although it might not be clear now, while I am blinding colleagues with figures. What the Alzheimer's Research Trust is trying to demonstrate in its report is the lack of ambition evident so far in the funding for dementia research. The report is saying not that less should be done elsewhere, but simply that the case for dementia research is compelling. Every dementia patient costs the economy £27,647 a year, which is more than the UK median salary of £24,700. By contrast, cancer patients cost £5,999, stroke patients £4,770 and heart disease patients £3,455. Delaying the onset of dementia by just five years would halve the number of deaths from the condition, saving 30,000 lives a year. That is a huge opportunity. The UK is undoubtedly playing a crucial role in finding a cure and leading the world in basic and clinical research, yet dementia research is woefully underfunded: the Government invest only 2 per cent. of their medical research budget in dementia, spending many times more on other health conditions. The 2009 report on dementia by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics stated that""the major research funding bodies within the UK do not appear to have explicit policies according to which they allocate funds between different conditions, focusing rather on research excellence and the 'importance' of the topic… Given the social and economic impact of dementia, we believe that a more explicit approach to research priorities would be likely to lead to significant increases in research funding for dementia. If such an increase were not to be matched by research applications of the necessary high standard, then active steps should be taken to develop and promote research capacity in the relevant areas"." The issue was recently recognised in the United States of America, which tends to take a fairly legislative approach to pushing issues forward. An Alzheimer's Breakthrough Bill is currently before Congress. They have lovely names for Bills in the States; our Clerks would not allow us to give a Bill a name of that sort. If the Bill is passed, it will allocate $2 billion to dementia research. Despite that significant American commitment to dementia research, the UK must play its own role, given our international advantages in dementia and other scientific research. The UK is second only to the US in dementia research impact. British scientists are responsible for 7 per cent. of the top cited dementia papers globally, and important innovations have come from UK research, such as the discovery of most of the genes associated with dementia so far, work leading to the development of the only licensed treatment of Alzheimer's and the neuropathology of several rarer dementias. Furthermore, the national health service gives the UK a competitive edge in trialling new dementia treatments. Recently, after the publication of "Dementia 2010", I was invited by the Royal Society of Chemistry to chair one of its public lectures, by Professor Chris Dobson, who is master of St. John's college and from the department of chemistry. He lectured on some of the extraordinary work done by him and his team of young graduates on the disease mechanism behind dementia and the role of proteins in the body. It is a potential key not only to unlocking our understanding of the disease, but to identifying treatments for dementia that arrest its progression and might even cure it. The team also established a link to other neurological conditions in our understanding of dementia. That research is being done in this country. We need more such research and the ambition to fund not just a cure, but the discoveries necessary to build bridges to it. The Minister's taskforce on dementia research, which is intended to drive the issue forward, held its first meeting on 24 February. Will he tell us a bit about that meeting? There is clear and demonstrable public support for investment and research into dementia. One survey found that 66 per cent. of people think that the Government should spend more money on dementia research, and only 2 per cent. thought that funding should be cut.