Declan McLoughlin Senior Lecturer Old Age Psychiatry Background

The licensing of drugs for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the subsequent NICE guidance issued in January 2001 has had considerable impact upon the treatment and care of people with dementia. We feel the impact goes beyond the pharmacological effect of the drugs themselves and, possibly at least as importantly, has improved the recognition and non-pharmacological treatment, not only of AD but of other dementias as well. It is known that the recognition of dementia in the community is problematical with consistent discrepancies between the known prevalence of dementia and the numbers of people with dementia known to social and health services. This failure to recognise dementia might result from a failure to present with early symptoms or a failure to recognise these as disease-related in either primary or secondary care. Our impression from our clinical work is that there has been a significant increase in the numbers presenting with memory problems, on the recognition of dementia in primary care and on the referral of people with possible dementia to secondary care. While these changes partly reflect the underlying trend towards a greater recognition of dementia by the general public and by the medical and social care professions, not least due to the work of the Alzheimer’s Society, w