Drugs which will halt the progression of Alzheimer's disease are likely to be available in less than a decade, a leading expert on the condition said in Dublin yesterday.
Prof Dennis Selkoe of Harvard Medical School said he was optimistic a number of experimental therapies at present at clinical trial stage would turn out to be successful in the next few years. "If there are people now who already have Alzheimer's they might benefit from this during the course of their illness.
"But a more likely beneficiary of this will be people about to get Alzheimer's," he said.
In Dublin for a conference on medical research into neuro-degenerative diseases at UCD, Prof Selkoe added that the new treatments being tried attack the fundamental cause and mechanism of Alzheimer's in contrast to treatments already on the market which were "largely symptomatic treatments" that make symptoms a little better but could not do anything about the progression of the disease.
Alzheimer's affects an estimated 35,000 people in Ireland but that figure is likely to increase dramatically in coming years as people live longer. In 95 per cent of cases the onset of the disease is after the age of 60 but there have been cases reported in younger persons, including an 18-year-old woman in the US.
There are believed to be about 30 million sufferers worldwide.
The disease, Prof Selkoe said, was the eighth most frequent cause of death in the US in 1999, where there are about 4 million sufferers and where up to $100 billion a year is spent on treating sufferers.
"I have no doubt it would be very wise for the Irish public to invest its tax in part in figuring out this disease more quickly.
"You could just let others do it but the more research that goes on in Ireland I think the better the chance that you will have good quality clinical trials that are using cutting edge approaches," he said.