Combination treatment needed to fight dementia

Combination therapies to tackle multiple changes in the brain may be needed to combat the growing problem of dementia in ageing societies, according to a study by the University of Sheffield. The findings, which were published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine, show that multiple abnormal (pathological) processes in the brain are often involved in cases of dementia, and that the drugs currently in development to treat individual brain pathologies may have a limited impact on the overall burden of dementia in the population. Dementia – which can involve problems with memory, language and judgement – is a growing social and clinical problem affecting a quarter of people 85 years or older and an estimated 35 million people worldwide. Professor Paul Ince, from the University of Sheffield´s Medical School, along with colleagues at the University of Cambridge, conducted the study to estimate the relative contribution of known causes of dementia in the brain to dementia at death. Their research drew upon data from the Medical Research Council´s Cognitive Function and Ageing Study – a major investigation into dementia in England and Wales that began in 1990 in which researchers used statistical methods to establish the proportion of dementia directly attributed to each specific change in the brain and other factors. In this study by the Medical Research Council, 456 people donated their brains for post-mortem examination after death. This enabled researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Cambridge to make an estimation of the contribution of each type of pathology to dementia in the population as a whole.