Alzheimer’s disease expert says treatments for the disease to be ready by 2040

A leading Alzheimer’s disease expert says that treatments for the disease will be ready by 2040.

Professor Julie Williams is the Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute, based at Cardiff University and she has been studying the disease for thirty years.

She says her research team have identified 92 genes that significantly increase the risk of getting Alzheimer’s. When they began their research in 2009, she says they only knew about three gene types.

“Things are speeding up and improving all the time, I’ve learnt more in the last seven years than I did in the previous twenty.”

During her conservation with the BBC, she said that after studying thousands of cases she realises there is no simple cure. Instead, she went on to say, the disease must be treated like heart disease or a stroke where there are many contributing factors and several therapies available to reduce the risk or prevent it.

“By 2040 I think we’ll be in a position to offer a range of treatments and we might not know exactly why, but one of them will be able to act on the huge range of causes.”

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common causes of dementia and one of the high-risk killers of people over the age of fifty in the UK.

Currently, there is a drug that can slow down Alzheimer’s and reduce the decline of memory. Lecanemab is taken by intravenous infusion every two weeks and studies show it reduces cognitive decline by 27 per cent. The drug should be available by the end of this year.

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