Category: Dementia

Independent Evaluation Of The Guinness Partnership’s Dementia Project

Housing LIN, November 2018
Evaluation of the progress made in becoming a more dementia-friendly organisation. The Guinness Partnership implemented a two year project in 2015 to take forward developments, initially in two pilot areas of Havant and Manchester with a view to rolling out successful approaches more broadly.
Click here to view the full report.

Assessing the Preparedness of the Health Care System Infrastructure in Six European Countries for an Alzheimer’s Treatment

RAND Corporation, October 2018
This research analyzes the preparedness of the health care systems in six European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — to ensure timely diagnosis and treatment of patients if a disease-modifying therapy for Alzheimer’s becomes available. It finds:

  • The burden of Alzheimer’s disease in high-income countries is expected to approximately double between 2015 and 2050. Recent clinical trial results give hope that a disease-modifying therapy might become available in the near future. The therapy is expected to treat early-stage patients to prevent or delay the progression to dementia.
  • This preventive treatment paradigm implies the need to screen, diagnose, and treat a large population of patients with mild cognitive impairment. There would be many undiagnosed prevalent cases that would need to be addressed initially, and then the longer-term capacity to address incident cases would not need to be as high.
  • We use a simulation model to assess the preparedness of the health care system infrastructure in six European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — to evaluate, diagnose, and treat the expected number of patients.
  • Projected peak wait times range from five months for treatment in Germany to 19 months for evaluation in France. The first year without wait times would be 2030 in Germany and 2033 in France, and 2042 in the United Kingdom and 2044 in Spain. Specialist capacity is the rate-limiting factor in France, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and treatment delivery capacity is an issue in most of the countries.
  • If a disease-modifying therapy becomes available in 2020, we estimate the projected capacity constraints could result in over 1 million patients with mild cognitive impairment progressing to Alzheimer’s dementia while on wait lists between 2020 and 2050 in these six countries.

Click here to view the full report.

BBC Music website offers dementia lifeline

BBC News, September 2018
A new BBC website aims to help by connecting dementia patients with the songs they love.   The site – which was launched as part of BBC Music Day – allows people to browse more than 1,800 songs, classical works and TV theme tunes from the last 100 years, creating a playlist of personally meaningful music…
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Click here to access the Music Memories website.

World Alzheimer Report 2018: The State Of The Art Of Dementia Research: New Frontiers

Alzheimer’s Disease International, September 2018
Alzheimer’s Disease International report that looks at a broad cross section of research areas including basic science; diagnosis; drug discovery; risk reduction and epidemiology. With the continued absence of a disease modifying treatment, the report also features progress, innovation and developments in care research. It highlights an urgent need for increased and sustainable funding for dementia research.
Click here to view the full report.