Surrey dementia charity emphasises the importance of early diagnosis
This comes after the government has invested £5 million into dementia research
A Surrey-based dementia charity told us about how vital early dementia diagnosis is for planning later life.
With one million people in the UK living with dementia, a number expected to rise to 1.4 million by 2040, the government has invested £5 million into research to come up with ideas to improve the quality of life for those living with this devastating disease and ease pressure on the NHS.
The government say that funding could go towards ramping up work on blood tests that spot the build-up of proteins associated with dementia, or saliva analysis that notices hormone changes at the early stages of a fading memory, or even before symptoms have begun to show.
Dementia first is an Independent Charity providing day care services in East Surrey solely for people with a diagnosis of dementia.
Claire Robertson, who is a trustee there says that often rare variants of dementia are picked up later than they could be.
"They can be very difficult to pick up because the sheer fact that they are rare means that certainly most GPs may not have come across with the more unusual, the more unusual dementias.
Even local memory clinics, um if people are not presenting with what I think of as sort of typical Alzheimer's disease type symptoms, then they can sometimes be told that it's not dementia or to go away."
Robertson emphasised that with earlier diagnosis, it means people can get their affairs in order, something which Robertson described as 'extremely important'.
"It's extremely important that people sort out their legal and their financial affairs early on, the vast majority of people with dementia should set up a power of attorney.
Who would sort out the bills that are coming in to keep your life on track? So it's very, very important that people get things like that sorted out at an early stage because in order to make a power of attorney, you have to have capacity and sadly, most people with dementia will lose capacity at some point".