Dementia is said to affect roughly 1 in 3 people, and yet in 2016/17 only 2% of charity spending on medical research went to dementia. For comparison this is six times less funding than cancer research. 
This is particularly shocking considering a recent study has found dementia kills more people per year than heart disease in England and Wales. As well as this, while cancer currently kills roughly double the number of people with dementia, it is estimated that within 25 years dementia will kill more people than cancer. It is therefore critical to try and find a cure for this disease as soon as possible.
One of the main problems facing the search for a dementia cure is a lack of awareness about the diesease itself. While most people believe it to  be one disease, there are in fact over 100 different types with the symptoms often varying widely person to person. As well as memory loss, common symptoms can include behavioural or mood  changes, struggling to keep up with conversation and difficulty planning or thinking things through. Dementia is scientifically a fatal brain disease so it is clearly a very serious illness. The lack of knowledge available on the subject has led to many patients only realising relatively late that they have dementia.
The theatre adaption of Lisa Genova’s book Still Alice might be doing something to change that. This tough, hard-hitting portrayal of the struggles of early-onset Alzheimer’s is based off Christine Mary Dunford’s stage adaption and not Julianne Moore’s film, which was released a year later. It’s British premiere was at Leeds Playhouse in February 2018 and it is now touring round the UK, having already performed in Richmond from 18th September to 22nd September The vivid, arresting portrayal of the mental demise of Alice Howland, a successful Harvard professor at the beginning, to a woman relying wholly on her family by the end forces the audience to think about the topic matter. 
Although Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, only around 40,000 of the 850,000 current dementia cases are of people under 65. Wendy Mitchell, who, like Alice, has early-onset Alzheimer, came in to talk to the cast of the play to try and increase the authenticity of it. 
In her programme notes, she describes how she searched online for anything that matched her symptoms before eventually finding a description of early-onset dementia. Smoking, drinking and diet all have very little effect on whether or not someone will get dementia, so even the fittest people are susceptible to it. Having dementia forces someone to focus entirely on the present, as the debilitating nature of the disease means focusing on the future is a risk as the circumstances may change drastically.
The other problem dementia research is having is a lack of funding. While government spending on dementia reasearch has increased the last few years to about £60 million, Hilary Evans, Chief Executive at Alzheimer’s Research UK has publicly called for the government to commit to “doubling its annual investment in dementisa research to £132 million over the next 5 years”. Something clearly has to be done to help dementia research but, while the government must fund and help it, charity spending must also increase. This is where increased awareness will help charities fund attempts to provide a treatment for dementia. 
The new £250 million Dementia Research Institute, funded by the Medical Research Council (UK), Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK shows that both the government and charities are beginning to help combat this disease.