Beginning in early 2013, researchers at two new Brain Health Centres will aim to demonstrate that time to diagnosis can be cut by an average of 15 months, and if deployed nationally from 2014, can raise diagnosis rates themselves closer to the Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge target of 80% – a doubling of the current average rate. The creation of the centres was announced earlier this week by the Prime Minister.
There are currently 800,000 individuals living with dementia in the UK, but fewer than half of them have been formally diagnosed. By aiding early and rapid diagnosis, the technologies developed by Cambridge Cognition, a Cambridge-based developer of neuropsychological tests, and London-based imaging company IXICO could add up to 18 months of independent living for dementia patients.
The initial assessment for determining a patient’s risk of developing dementia will be conducted by GPs using Cambridge Cognition’s CANTABmobile software on an iPad. The test, which takes less than ten minutes, differentiates between patients with normal and abnormal memory.
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Image: CANTABmobile report of cognitive function
Credit: Cambridge Cognition
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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