Imagine a cure for dementia – how medical research holds the key

Imagine that you are diagnosed with dementia. You’re told it will progressively deprive you of your ability to think, your personality, and your independence. Now imagine the doctor says your condition could have been treated if it was diagnosed 10 years earlier, but the damage to your brain is now too extensive.

An Auckland researcher has just been granted $200,000 to further the quest to identify dementia years or decades before clinical diagnosis, with hope that early intervention is possible.

“We’re trying to find a way to determine who is in the very early stages of dementia before they have any of these clinical symptoms,” Dr Brigid Ryan explains.

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