New World Alzheimer’s report launched today at World Alzheimer’s Day

www.alz.co.uk/worldreport2018

The report has been written to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Please distribute it to your media contacts, colleagues, and wider communities. We want to spread the message far and wide!

About the report

The report takes a fresh approach this year. It is different in look, in feel and in tone. We commissioned the journalist, writer and broadcaster, Christina Patterson, to interview 21 of the leading lights in dementia research across the globe. We interviewed researchers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan, Nigeria, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. The report appeals to a really broad audience including governments and policymakers, academics and researchers and the general public with an interest in dementia. It covers a lot of ground and answers a lot of complex questions that continually present themselves in our work. Hopefully you will also agree that this publication justifies ADI’s call for increased research expenditure in dementia.

Essentially the report is an overview of where we are currently: the hopes and frustrations, the barriers, the enablers and the ground-breaking work being undertaken.

The report’s key calls-to-action:

• Improving the sharing, using and disseminating of data and using registries in the best possible way.
• A minimum 1% of the societal cost of dementia to be devoted to funding research in: basic science, care improvements, prevention and risk reduction, drug development and public health.
• Attracting researchers and skill to the sector
• Increasing the scale of new research with the global ratio of publications on neurodegenerative disorders versus cancer at just 1:12
• Involvement of people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the research process.
• Encouraging innovation, the use of technology and entrepreneurship.

About World Alzheimer’s Month 2018

• This year’s World Alzheimer’s Month campaign is focused around the theme of “Every three seconds” based on the statistic that every three seconds someone around the world develops dementia.
• 50 million people are now living with dementia now globally.
• The number of people living with dementia is predicted to triple, rising to 152 million by 2050.
• In 2018, 10 million people are expected to develop dementia and the economic burden of dementia is US$1trillion.

The World Health Organisation recognised the scale of the epidemic by introducing the Global action plan on the public health response to dementia 2017-2025 but progress towards developing national plans in 75% of Member States by 2025 has been slow and we must galvanise governments to develop and fund plans in response.

We are hoping to make versions of the report available in other languages in the near future.

Best regards,

The ADI team