<div><p>LONDON (Reuters) - Dementia costs Britain 23 billion pounds ($37 billion) a year, more than cancer and heart disease combined, and the number of sufferers is expected to rise nearly 20 percent to over a million by 2025, experts said Wednesday.</p><p>A study for the Alzheimer's Research Trust (ART) by Oxford University researchers found that the cost of caring for dementia sufferers, mainly elderly people, is far higher than previously thought, and that dementia receives only a fraction of the funds spent on other important diseases.</p><p>"The UK's dementia crisis is worse than we feared. This report shows that dementia is the greatest medical challenge of the 21st century," ART chief executive Rebecca Wood said in a statement with the study.</p><p>She called for more funding for research into dementia, a brain-wasting disease which robs patients of their memory and their ability to understand things and care for themselves.</p><p>"If we spend a more proportionate sum on dementia research, we could unleash the full potential of our scientists in their race for a cure. Spending millions now really can save us crippling multi-billion pound care bills later," she said.</p><p>Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease International says some 35 million people around the world now suffer from it or other types of dementia.</p><p>The number of cases globally is expected to almost double every 20 years to 66 million in 2030 and over 115 million in 2050, and the cost of coping with the disease in aging populations is forecast to rise dramatically in coming decades.</p><p>An independent spending watchdog accused the British government last month of doing too little to implement a plan to tackle urgent demand for better dementia care.</p><p>Wednesday's report estimated the number of dementia sufferers in Britain now at 822,000, higher than previously thought, rising to more than one million by 2025.</p><p>Combined government and charitable spending on research totals just 50 million pounds a year for dementia, compared with 590 million pounds for cancer and 169 million pounds for heart disease.</p><p>Alastair Gray, the report's author and a professor of health economics at Oxford University, said the discrepancies between the funds available for dementia and its economic burden and those for other diseases were reflected in public perceptions of the disease.</p><p>"Many of us know people who have had cancer or heart disease but have been successfully treated and survived, so there is a perception that something can be done," he said.</p><p>"In contrast there are no cures for dementia ... so there may well be a feeling of inevitability surrounding it. However the lack of effective treatments is surely an argument for devoting more effort to research, not less," he said.</p><p>(Editing by Tim Pearce)</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=68377797&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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