October 26, 2007

Funding for largest Alzheimer’s study

A research team at Cardiff University have been given a fantastic opportunity to look into the genetics that are behind the late onset of Alzheimer’s. The team have been given £1.3 million from the Wellcome Trust who is the UK’s largest medical research charity.

With over 700,000 people in the UK suffering from this disease and at the moment there is only £11 spent per person on research into Alzheimer’s, while on the other hand there is £289 spent per person on research for cancer sufferers.

The work will involve taking samples from 14,000 people; they will use a mix of 6,000 Alzheimer’s sufferers and 8,000 healthy samples. It’s likely that they be find many unexpected problems as the human genome contains over 500,000 genetic markers.

Source [Mental Health Help]