Dementia costs Britain £23 billion (€26 billion) a year, more than cancer and heart disease combined.
Moreover, the number of sufferers is expected to rise nearly 20 per cent to more than a million by 2025, experts said yesterday.
A study for the Alzheimers Research Trust (Art) by Oxford University researchers found that the cost of caring for dementia sufferers, mainly elderly people, is far higher than previously thought, and that dementia receives only a fraction of the funds spent on other important diseases.
“The UK’s dementia crisis is worse than we feared. This report shows that dementia is the greatest medical challenge of the 21st Century,” Art chief executive Rebecca Wood said.
She called for more funding for research into dementia, a brain-wasting disease which robs patients of their memory and ability to care for themselves.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease International says some 35 million people globally now suffer from it or other types of dementia. The number of cases globally is expected to almost double every 20 years and the cost of coping with the disease in ageing populations is forecast to rise dramatically.
An independent spending watchdog accused the British government last month of doing too little to implement a plan to tackle an urgent demand for better dementia care. Yesterday’s report estimated the number of dementia sufferers in Britain at 822,000, rising to more than one million by 2025. Combined government and charitable spending on research totals just £50 million a year for dementia, compared with £590 million for cancer and £169 million for heart disease.
Alastair Gray, the report’s author and a professor of health economics at Oxford University, said the discrepancies between the funds available for dementia and its economic burden and those for other diseases were reflected in public perceptions of the disease.
“Many of us know people who have had cancer or heart disease but have been successfully treated and survived, so there is a perception that something can be done,” he said. “In contrast there are no cures for dementia . . . the lack of effective treatments is surely an argument for devoting more effort to research, not less.”