Dementia total more than estimate

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A report commissioned by the Alzheimer's Research Trust has found that Northern Ireland has about 24,000 people suffering from dementia.

The figure is some 8,000 more than that estimated by local dementia charities.

The UK-wide report said that the impact of dementia on society and the economy, has been significantly underestimated.

Claire Keating, from the Alzheimer's Society, said that the Government needed to invest more in dealing with the problem.

"We would like to see significant investment in research into what causes dementia, how people can prevent dementia, in better diagnosis so that people are diagnosed early and can access the treatments care and support they need," she said.

"And for the services and treatment for the people who live with dementia to be designed around what makes their lives better, involving them in the decisions about their care and creating maximum choice for people who live with dementia."

The report said that dementia now costs the UK economy twice as much as cancer but gets a fraction of the funding to find causes and cures.

For every £1 spent on dementia research, £12 goes on investigating cancer, figures from the Alzheimer's Research Trust indicated.

With 821,884 sufferers, dementia costs the UK £23bn annually, the report says.

The number of sufferers is 15% higher than had been estimated, according to the Dementia 2010 report, and the trust says it will now pass the one million mark before 2025.

The annual burden on the economy meanwhile is 35% higher than the previous calculations of £17bn.

Researchers from the University of Oxford compared the cost of caring for a person with dementia to the cost of dealing with cancer, heart disease or stroke - the three main causes of death in the UK.

As well as immediate health care expenses, they looked at the costs of social care, unpaid carers and productivity losses.

Every dementia patient, they found, costs the economy £27,647 each year - nearly five times more than a cancer patient, and eight times more than those with heart disease.

It was the costs met by unpaid carers and incurred by long-term institutional care - rather than expenses shouldered by the NHS - that pushed up the burden of dementia.

But they also found that the costs of these conditions appeared to bear little relation to the respective amounts invested by government and charities in research into causes, treatment and prevention.

They calculated that for every person with cancer, £295 is spent on research, compared with £61 for each person with dementia.