- Indian-origin neurologist Dr. Ashwini Keshavan has been made a part of Britain’s world-class research team.
- This team has been entrusted with the task of conducting research towards detecting dementia through blood tests and collecting more evidence in this direction.
- The results of this research team can be used more widely in the coming five years.
- Due to dementia, memory becomes weak in the people affected by it.
- Dr. Ashwini Keshavan is part of a team focusing on p-tau217, a promising biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease. At the same time, another team of researchers from Oxford and Cambridge universities will test various proteins to detect diseases that cause dementia.
- Both teams will aim to make the treatment affordable and recruit participants from across the UK.
Dementia
- Dementia is a syndrome. It is usually of a chronic nature – leading to a decline in cognitive function, in contrast to the usual results of the biological theory of aging.
- It impacts memory, cognitive functions like reasoning and comprehension, spatial awareness, mathematical abilities, learning capacity, language skills, and decision-making processes.
- However, consciousness is not affected due to dementia.
- Of the total deaths due to this, 65% are women. Disability-adjusted life years due to dementia are approximately 60% longer in women than in men.