There are over 50 million people worldwide living with dementia and by 2030 this number is expected to reach 82 million. 

The ageing brain becomes vulnerable to decline and keeping independency in daily life can become a challenge for the elderly. A lot of people get their diagnosis too late. This takes away the opportunity for timely decisions regarding therapeutic interventions. People with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), an intermediate condition between normal brain ageing and dementia, may progress into dementia within the next five years after the symptoms are shown. 

Quite worrying as it sounds, there is an urgent need for early risk assessment and intervention. Besides time-consuming patient investigations with low discriminative power for dementia risk, current treatment options focus on late symptoms management due to a lack of diagnostic tools. This causes numerous implications in terms of familial, medical and care costs. Given the importance of addressing the growing burden of dementia and the current limitations of resources, there is an increasing need for funding agencies and the private sector to prioritise dementia research investments.