Recipient organisationCardiff UniversitySource-published name: Cardiff University
Funding£4.6M
PeriodMar 2014 — Mar 2019
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Dementia’s underlying disease processes begin in middle age, long before memory fails, and this project builds a national data platform to catch those earliest changes. The problem is that current treatments arrive too late. By the time someone has symptoms, the brain is already badly damaged. Yet studying healthy people to find who will develop dementia is inefficient and expensive—researchers waste years following people who stay well. This project creates a single shared infrastructure that pools data from all major UK dementia studies, from elderly cohorts with many dementia cases to newly recruited middle-aged groups showing subtle early signs. A powerful computing system will let scientists across disciplines rapidly compare findings, spot the same biological mechanisms operating at different ages, and test whether a target identified in older brains also appears in younger ones. If this works, the impact is a shift from treating dementia after it strikes to intervening decades earlier. Even if the underlying disease cannot be stopped completely, slowing it down enough—and starting that slowdown early enough—could mean most people never experience dementia’s worst effects, even if their mental arithmetic is not what it once was. The project also confronts the ethical question of what to tell someone who shows early changes, an issue that must be faced if prevention is to become routine.
View original technical description
Dementia is one of the biggest health issues that we face and is a major concern for governments around the world. Recent studies have shown that the disease processes which underlie dementia begin in middle age if not before. This suggests that it is better to develop treatments that can be used long before dementia begins to affect daily life. However, identifying these early changes is very difficult. To make detecting early changes easier, we want to create a 'one-stop-shop' for dementia researchers. We think this will help in several ways: 1. It will bring scientists and industry together in partnership. This will direct our scientific efforts in ways that will help develop new treatments more efficiently. 2. It will reduce the risk of failure. A major problem in studying the early stages of dementia is finding the right people to study. It's too late if a person has dementia and it's a waste of time if they won't ever get it. To overcome this problem we will measure in detail large numbers of apparently healthy people to identify those who are showing signs of early change. 3. It will enable quicker discovery. We will bring together and share results and insights from all the major dementia related studies in the UK so that we know have a better idea of where to put our effort. For example, we will be able to rapidly identify target mechanisms in, for example, a cohort of older people with many dementia cases, and see if we find the same mechanisms operating in younger persons with early changes found in a newly recruited cohort. Combining all the information available to us in order to achieve these goals is not easy and so we will develop a powerful computing and information integration infrastructure to ensure that data and the ability to analyse it is available and accessible to a wide range of scientists representing many specialist disciplines. This project raises some difficult ethical issues. For example, what should you tell someone if they show early changes? However, these issues have to be faced if we are going to solve the dementia problem. Using these methods we think that the impact of dementia can be much reduced. Even if we are unable to stop the underlying mechanisms that produce dementia completely, by finding ways of slowing them down, and by applying these treatments as early as possible, it may be that most of us need never actually suffer the indignity of dementia, even if our 'mental arithmetic' is not what it once was.
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