Brains for dementia research

700,000 people are living with a form of dementia in the UK today, a number forecast to double within a generation. Despite being relatively common, knowledge and treatments are very limited, partly because research cannot, in many cases be achieved without the use of human tissue. At present the only way to diagnose dementia is upon post mortem.

We now appreciate dementia is a wide 'catch all' term, and need to get better at understanding how particular symptoms in life correlate with what we see in the brain after death, in order to develop better treatments. For example, dementia caused by multiple tiny interruptions to the blood supply of the brain, that gradually deprive more and more of the brain of oxygen is likely to need quite different treatment to dementia that arises from nerve cells not processing proteins normally and slowly dying.