Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve (a) the level of medical research into Alzheimer’s disease and (b) care for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

We have been implementing the Challenge on Dementia 2020 to transform care, support, awareness and research for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease by 2020. The Challenge contained the commitment to spend £300 million on dementia research over the five years to March 2020. This commitment was delivered a year early with £344 million spent on dementia research over four years. Much of this investment is in research to better understand the nature of dementia, in order to inform development of future treatments and ways to prevent the onset of the condition.

The Department, through the National Institute for Health Research, has also commissioned major research on dementia care and living well with dementia. We are currently working on ways to significantly boost further research on dementia at all stages on the translation pathway including medical and care interventions.