Local MP’s call for people to join new national mission to beat dementia.

A new national mission has been launched to tackle dementia and research funding has been doubled in memory of the late Dame Barbara Windsor.

Dame Barbara’s husband, Scott Mitchell, met with the Prime Minister earlier this month at Downing Street. They discussed the significant suffering caused by dementia and the slow process of finding treatments and cures.

In response, the Prime Minister launched the ‘Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission,’ in honour of Dame Barbara and the millions of other people and their loved ones whose lives have been changed by dementia.

An additional £95 million in ringfenced funding will support the national mission, boosting the number of clinical trials and innovative research projects. This will help meet the commitment to double dementia research funding by 2024, reaching a total of £160 million a year.

Local MP, Andrew Jones, is calling on people to join the national mission by volunteering to be part of clinical research aimed at beating the terrible disease.

Mr Jones said:

By 2025 around one million people will be living with dementia. Dementia can affect the brain years before any symptoms show which means treatments need to be tested on people far earlier than we might assume. Because of this, and because the causes of dementia are so poorly understood, clinical research is critically important. That is why I am calling on local people to sign up.

New volunteers can register their interest through the Join Dementia Research website.

The new national mission will build on recent advances in biological and data sciences, including genomics, AI and the latest brain imaging technology, to test new treatments from a growing range of possible options.

Researchers will look for signals of risk factors, which could help those who are at risk from developing dementia to understand how they might be able to slow or prevent the disease in the future.