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UCL in the News: Dementia is a living death for 700,000 Britons

17 February 2008

Amelia Hill, 'The Observer' After being a 'Cinderella' area for years, dementia was nominated as one of the UK Clinical Research Network's four new priority areas in 2005.

More than £20m was used to create DeNDRoN, the new Dementias and Neurodegenerative Diseases Research Network, which has enabled experts who have spent decades fighting for scraps of funding to dedicate themselves to understanding and battling this cruellest of diseases.

Pre-eminent among these experts are Professors Nick Fox and Martin Rossor [both UCL Institute of Neurology]. Both men played key roles in the development of the most significant innovations yet made in dementia research: the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to detect brain degeneration several years before symptoms become apparent, and the discovery of the genes causing the disease.

'This is a lethal, pitiless disease, but I think we're genuinely on the cusp of finding a treatment,' said Rossor. …

'The pace of advances in this field in the past couple of years has been extraordinary. The government's new commitment means for the first time, I can confidently predict there will be a treatment available within 10 years. We're not talking about getting people back to normal,' he emphasises. 'But immunotherapy could slow down, and possibly prevent, the early changes that lead to memory loss and learning problems, neither of which are possible at the moment.' …

'The impact of immunotherapy will be wasted if sufferers in their early stages continue to be ignored or misdiagnosed,' said Rossor. …

Fox's technique of using scans to monitor cell loss prior to a sufferer exhibiting symptoms of dementia, for example, is being adapted to measure whether novel treatments may slow down disease progression.

'Volunteers in the earliest stage of dementia can be scanned while performing certain tasks,' said Dr Jason Warren [UCL Institute of Neurology]. 'This means we can see what happens to brain function before structural damage occurs, speeding our ability to diagnose disease or judge new drugs." …

A few doors along from Warren's room, Dr Jonathan Rohrer [UCL Institute of Neurology] is focusing on a treatment for a different form of dementia: frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), the term for a group of conditions caused by loss of brain cells in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. …

'One and a half years ago we only knew of one gene that caused FTLD, the Tau gene, but another has been discovered that is twice as common - the progranulin gene - as well as two rarer ones,' he said. 'Research in this area has taken off in a massive way in the past few months. Neurogenetics is hugely expanding. We're discovering more and more genes, which is revolutionising our abilities to both diagnose and hopefully, in the future, to treat people.' …