The funding by Innovate UK, as part of the Government’s Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Goals programme, builds on over £5 million invested by the People’s Postcode Lottery into two studies of dementia blood tests through the Blood Biomarker Challenge\*.
The new funding announced today is for a quick and easy digital test of patients’ cognitive functions, taking only 10 minutes, which could lead to more accurate diagnoses when administered with blood biomarker tests for Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia. It will be delivered by the Dementia Platform UK’s (DPUK) READ-OUT (REAl World Dementia OUTcomes) study team.
The team is looking to identify the best blood tests (as well as the most economically effective) ways for accurate memory disorder diagnosis. It is hoped this crucial work will lead to people accessing vital care and support sooner and more quickly. This is imperative if new treatments are introduced in the NHS as these work best for people in the earliest stage of their disease.
The DPUK project is led from Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. Its, researchers are recruiting over 3,000 volunteers, at 28 UK-wide memory clinic sites from DPUK’s Trials Delivery Framework (TDF).. Some of the first participants attended the Warneford Hospital in Oxford at the end of last year.
READ-OUT is testing multiple existing and novel blood tests that can help identify a range of causes of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies. The tests have the potential to offer a fast, cheap, and non-invasive way of spotting the early signs of dementia sooner, by testing how effective these are in NHS memory clinics.
[Read the full story on the Dementias Platform UK website.](https://www.dementiasplatform.uk/news-and-media/latest-news/digital-test-is-a-boost-to-read-out-biomarker-study-into-effective-ways-of-spotting-dementia-sooner)