Over-optimism

The cure for the NHS woes

On the weekend, Tom sent me a Times article: ‘A blood test for Alzheimer’s — that’s a game-changer.’

In 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron announced an initial £150 million in funding for the UK Dementia Research Institute. Good old Dave and other leaders agreed at the G8 dementia summit that a cure for dementia would be available by 2025.  Dave went on to be President of Alzheimer’s Research UK, but what happened to his promise now that we are nearing 2025?

In the Times article, Siddharthan Chandran, the head of the UK’s Dementia Research Institute, now finds reasons to be hopeful. 

Chandran says we’re not far from “a tipping point.”  “A world in which each of us receives a brain score, in the same way that today we have a cholesterol score, and there are things we can actually do to make it better.”

It all sounds excellent, but Chandran forgot that despite heaps of research on risk scores, only a few make their way into clinical practice, often because there is no link to clinical decis…