G8 Dementia Summit aims to double Alzheimer’s funding by 2025

The health ministers of the G8 countries made an official declaration at the Dementia Summit held at the Lancaster House in London Dec. 11 to develop a viable treatment for Alzheimer’s disease within the next 12 years.

The new policy published online calls for more robust campaigns for research, interconnectivity and data sharing between nations in addition to funding efforts to develop technologies that could potentially modify or cure dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Three more meetings scheduled for next year will follow-up on the new policy.

Attending stakeholders included government officials, clinicians, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and dementia nonprofits the world over. Speakers at the event included Margaret Chan, MD, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) and David Cameron, U.K. prime minister.

New information about dementia and Alzheimer’s came from a 2012 WHO report, which estimated that 35 million people worldwide were affected by dementia and that those numbers were expected to nearly double every 20 years. The official declaration also estimated that 70 percent of the global yearly cost of $604 billion goes toward “informal, social and direct medical care” and 60 percent of sufferers live in low- or middle-income nations, which was noted as an added incentive to develop means to manage and treat dementia populations. Another G8 Dementia Summit is scheduled in the U.S. in 2015.