European healthcare systems are today faced with new challenges regarding neurocognitive diseases. The elderly population is growing and people aged over 60 will increase by approximately 2 million people per annum in the coming decades expected to represent around 30 percent of the total European population in year 2060. Given the prevalence of dementia, Alzheimer´s and other cognitive impairments in the elderly population (50% of 90-year-olds have some sort of dementia diagnosis and from age 65, the risk of getting dementia doubles every five years), neurocognitive diseases will in the future pose one of Europe´s major public health challenges.
Both mental illness and age-related diseases result in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) e.g. memory loss and poor work-state memory and although MCI can be temporary as is the case with patients suffering from Depression, MCI can also be symptoms of a serious neurocognitive disease such as Dementia, Alzheimer´s or Burnout. As many chronic diseases can present cognitive dysfunction symptomatology, depending on the severity of each case, an accurate assessment/monitoring of the individual’s cognitive state is key as it can provide important information about the patient’s need and help to adjust pharmaceutical or behavioral intervention. Surveying/monitoring cognitive profile can provide clinicians with data about individual’s cognitive fluctuations in different circumstances (possibly explained by other collateral factors such as stress, sleep or hormones). Moreover, many interventions have a much higher success-rate if utilized before the disease has progressed.
Despite the need for early assessment, neurocognitive tests are used too seldom and too late in the healthcare chain, mainly due to screening tools being expensive and time-consuming as they require specialists for administering, analysis and evaluation. As general practitioner physicians (GP:s) do not have the resources or time to cognitively screen patients, a patient needs to be referred to hospitals and specialist clinics to be assessed. Since little screening is done prior to a referral, many patients are referred and consequently there is a long waiting list before seeing a specialist - during which the disease develops and progress to a stage where they are difficult, more expensive and less successful to treat. For example, in Sweden there is an under-diagnostization amongst elderly of neurocognitive dysfunctions and 50% of patients with dementia are not receiving the right dementia diagnosis.
Furthermore, new research is progressing to a stage where a pharmaceutical therapy that can treat or delay early-stage dementia patients is likely to be on the European market as soon as 2020. As new methods for treatment requires the disease to be in an early stage, the European healthcare systems will be posed with the challenge to move away from mitigating symptoms of dementia to allow for early screening and treatment of the disease. At the same time, research shows that long waiting-lists for neurocognitive screening may result in over a million patients with MCI progressing into dementia between 2020 and 2044 in six European countries.
The goal of the project (phase 1 and 2) is to bring the Minnemera concept to international market launch and move the TRL level from 6 to 9. The goal of phase 1 has been to investigate the technical, economic and financial feasibility of the innovation and get commitment from test partners for phase 2.
