“The developed world has committed itself to a scientific and social onslaught on Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at the G8 Dementia Summit in London,” the Financial Times reports (Cookson, 12/11). “Leading countries set a goal of finding a cure or effective treatment for dementia by 2025 on Wednesday and ministers said the world needed to fight the spread of the memory-robbing condition just as it fought AIDS,” Reuters writes (Hirschler, 12/11). “The G8 said it would ‘develop a coordinated international research action plan’ to target the gaps in research and ways to address them,” according to BBC News. “It also called on the [WHO] to identify dementia as ‘an increasing threat to global health’ and to help countries adapt to the dementia time bomb,” the news agency writes (Gallagher, 12/11).

Speaking at the summit, British Prime Minister David Cameron “declared that discovering a cure or treatment for dementia is ‘within our grasp,'” the Associated Press notes (Cheng, 12/11). “The U.K. government is to double funding for dementia research by 2025 and make available … a scan that can rule out Alzheimer’s disease,” Cameron announced at the summit, adding “he would double funding research from £66 million [$108 million] in 2015 to £122 million [$200 million] in 2025,” The Guardian reports (Siddique, 12/11). The Telegraph provides video footage of U.K. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt speaking at the event, where he warned “‘we will bankrupt our health care systems’ if we do not face up to the challenge of dementia, stressing the need to improve diagnosis rates” (12/11).