Dementia and Cancer Funding

Further to my last post, there is an interesting BBC report on Alzheimer's disease funding, based on a study called Dementia 2010.  The study finds that Alzheimers costs much more to manage but attracts much less research funding than cancer, stroke or heart disease.

Cancer, though a very tricky research area, is a great example of the "treatment over prevention" preference of today's healthcare agenda. The cheapest way to cut the rate of cancers would be to persuade people to lose weight, eat more fibre (especially green vegetables), stop smoking and drink less alcohol.  Governments don't do this very aggressively, especially in the case of diet. Why not tax saturated fat like tobacco, for example?

Cancer has a ubiquity, emotive urgency and immediate devastating impact that makes it relatively easy to attract funding to the area, and I don't minimise the personal impact on those affected, but there is another, practical, reason why the drug industry has neglected dementia.  Oncology clinical trials are over in a short period of time, usually.  Results are measured in the weeks or months of extra life gained. Drugs can be tested and marketed within "reasonable" timeframes and budgets.

Dementia takes years to develop and progress, so clinical trials of new drugs also need to be long.  Worse than that, the effects of the disease and the treatments are subtle so the trials need to involve a lot of people if they are to show benefits with any statistical confidence. The costs are therefore huge for treatment studies and almost prohibitive for prevention studies.

As our society ages, the number of dementia sufferers in the UK may pass 1 million in the next fifteen years. Each of these patients requires expensive, long-term care which will be an expensive drain on state finances.  The situation is the same in all developed countries and will eventually be replicated globally as average lifespan improves.

Notwithstanding the difficulty and cost of the research, it will prove a good social investment to rebalance funding priorities and to work harder to prevent and cure dementia. In the drug industry, ROI is king (French speakers please pardon my pun). This one case where we need to find a better way of giving the drug industry that return-on-investment and bringing the risks down to acceptable and investable levels.