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More than 20,000 people have volunteered to be part of a study aimed at speeding up the development of dementia drugs.
The group will enable scientists to involve healthy people in clinical trials to test whether new drugs can slow the decline in brain functions including memory, and delay the onset of dementia.
There has been recent progress developing drugs that slow the progression of the disease, but the two leading treatments only have a small effect.
Additionally, many new approaches that work in animal studies fail in patient clinical trials.
We’ve created a resource that is unmatched anywhere else in the world
Experts suggest one explanation for the failures is that the drugs are tested in people who already have memory loss.
This means that by this stage it may be too late to stop or reverse the disease.
Therefore there is an urgent need to understand what is going on before people develop symptoms in the early stages of disease.
This approach requires a large group of people to be recalled for clinical and experimental studies of cognitive decline.
Professor Patrick Chinnery from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge, and co-chairman of the NIHR BioResource, who has led the project, said: “We’ve created a resource that is unmatched anywhere else in the world, recruiting people who are not showing any signs of dementia rather than people already having symptoms.
“It will allow us to match individuals to particular studies and speed up the development of much-needed new drugs to treat dementia.
“We know that over time our cognitive function decreases, so we’ve plotted out the expected trajectory of various different cognitive functions over our volunteers’ life course according to their genetic risk.
“We’ve also asked the question, ‘What are the genetic mechanisms that predispose you to slow or fast cognitive decline as you age?’”
The study has already helped scientists show for the first time that two important mechanisms in the body – inflammation and metabolism – play a role in the decline in brain function as we age.
The data, from over 20,000 volunteers, helps us to better understand the connection between participants’ genes and cognitive decline and allows for further ground-breaking analysis in future
By 2050, approximately 139 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide.
In the UK in 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson launched the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission, part of the government’s commitment to double research funding for dementia.
Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, scientists led by the University of Cambridge in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society report how they have recruited 21,000 people aged 17-85 to the Genes and Cognition Cohort within the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) BioResource.
Dr Richard Oakley, associate director of research and innovation at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “This exciting study, funded by Alzheimer’s Society, is an important step in helping us to better understand how the diseases that cause dementia begin, and will aid in the development of new treatments that target the early stages of these diseases.
“The data, from over 20,000 volunteers, helps us to better understand the connection between participants’ genes and cognitive decline and allows for further ground-breaking analysis in future.
“One in three people born in the UK today will go on to develop dementia in their lifetime but research will beat dementia.
“We need to make it a reality sooner through more funding, partnership working and people taking part in dementia research.”
Source: independent.co.uk
