Funding for dementia slammed

Health experts from 11 British universities have written an open letter to Health Secretary Alan Johnson, slamming what they dubbed ‘pitifully low’ funding for research into dementia. They warned the NHS would not survive the next 20 years unless funding for dementia improved.
Dementia care currently costs the UK economy more than £17 billion, but that is expected to double to £35 billion within 20 years, experts said. While 700,000 dementia patients live in the UK, that number is expected to rise to more than one million by 2025.

In the letter to the Health Secretary, Professor Simon Lovestone from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, and ten other dementia experts, said: “As the NHS turns 60, the question isn’t whether it will last a further 60 years, but if it can survive the next 20.
Funding for dementia research is pitifully low, while care costs are at an all-time high.“With the prevalence of dementia expected to double within a generation, the health service as we know it may well be unsustainable. A quarter of the Department of Health’s research budget is spent on cancer research, compared with just three per cent invested in finding new ways of preventing or treating dementia.”