The 10p-a-day vitamin supplement that tackles dementia: So why is the drug industry spending billions?

[From The Article]
Modern medicine has let us cheat death. We can replace organs, take pills to stave off heart disease, cure many cancers, and control previously fatal conditions such as diabetes. As a result, the average life expectancy is 80, whereas 100 years ago it was 52. Yet now, if these other illnesses don’t get us, it seems that dementia will.
More than 800,000 Britons suffer from some form of the disease, with 75 per cent of them having Alzheimer’s. All lead to mental decline, memory loss, speech and movement problems, and death.

[SNIP]

I am the founding director of the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA), which studies the causes of dementia. Last year  we recruited 270 elderly people with memory problems and gave them Vitamin B tablets – folic acid (800 micrograms), B12 (500 micrograms) and B6 (20 milligrams).

[SNIP]
Large-scale studies are needed to see if nutrition and exercise can slow the conversion of memory impairment to Alzheimer’s disease. We also need to know if they improve the response to drugs such as donepezil.  
For OPTIMA, the next step is a trial of 1,000 people with MCI to see if  B vitamins prevent the conversion to dementia over a two-year period. Can AD be beaten? I am optimistic.
The author is Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and co-founder of OPTIMA.

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