Date published: 2010/02/04
The BBC says:
Dementia now costs the UK economy twice as much as cancer but gets a fraction of the funding to find causes and cures, a report seen by the BBC shows.
For every one pound spent on dementia research, 12 times that sum goes on investigating cancer, figures from the Alzheimer's Research Trust indicate.
Bridging this gap is urgent, it says, particularly given the numbers with dementia are much higher than thought.
With 821,884 sufferers, dementia costs the UK £23bn annually, the report says.
The number of sufferers is 15% higher than had been estimated, according to the Dementia 2010 Report, and the trust says it will now pass the one million mark before 2025.
The annual burden on the economy meanwhile is 35% higher than the previous calculations of £17bn.
Researchers from the University of Oxford compared the cost of caring for a person with dementia to the cost of dealing with cancer, heart disease or stroke - the three main causes of death in the UK.
As well as immediate health care expenses, they looked at the costs of social care, unpaid carers and productivity losses.
Every dementia patient, they found, costs the economy £27,647 each year - nearly five times more than a cancer patient, and eight times more than those with heart disease.
It was the costs met by unpaid carers and incurred by long-term institutional care - rather than expenses shouldered by the NHS - that pushed up the burden of dementia.
But they also found that the costs of these conditions appeared to bear little relation to the respective amounts invested by government and charities in research into causes, treatment and prevention.
With nearly £600m a year, cancer research funding was 12 times that of the £50m devoted to dementia, while heart disease received three times as much. Only stroke research received less.
They calculated that for every person with cancer, £295 is spent on research, compared with just £61 for each person with dementia.
This reads just like a press release for the Alzheimer's Research Trust. No matter how well intended, the BBC should not just publish press releases for special interest pressure groups. Surprise, every special interest pressure group has a million and one reasons why the rest of society should throw more money at the special interest. It should be up to the BBC to critique the request, not just reprint it.
No report sanctioned by a special interest pressure group should be taken at face value. In particular, the "burden" on the economy allegedly being 35% higher should be taken with a pinch of salt. In particular, how does society value "unpaid" time for care, or for just about anything for that matter? If parents had to hire someone to look after their children then the cost would be huge, but that doesn't mean that that is how much the parents' "unpaid" time should be valued when they look after their own children.
On top of this, the Alzheimer's Research Trust is also playing a dumb game. No government minister who reads this press release is going to think "boy, we better throw some more money at Alzheimer research (and all the other non-cancer diseases)". Instead the obvious conclusion is going to be for the government to spend less money on cancer. The playing field, if anything, will be levelled down, not up.
Of course a lot of money for cancer research comes from charities like CRUK. And cancer charities do quite well because the British public over the years have decided, or been pushed into believing, that cancer is the most deserving medical cause.
And cancer often strikes relatively young people, whereas dementia is mainly an old person's disease. It's not too surprising that people might find it more important to help prolong the life of someone who is 40 or 50 than someone who is 70 or 80.
And there is a serious underlying issue here. The reason that dementia has come more into play these days is that other diseases have been somewhat successfully managed. The deterioration of the brain is an extremely difficult problem to solve. And, after all, you have to die of something, and if the ways of dying that are easy to fix are resolved, that is obviously going to leave the more difficult ones becoming more frequent.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").