There are a lot of very good reasons for staying in the EU, but the one I specifically want to focus on here is Alzheimer's research.
At the moment, there are no drug treatments that can offer anything other than a very small and limited benefit to sufferers of Alzheimer’s, or indeed any other type of dementia. More than 46.8 million people around the world are living with dementia – more than the population of Spain (including all of our British expats that we've left there). With an ageing population, this figure is predicted to double by 2050. The current cost of caring for people in the UK with Alzheimer’s is more than either cancer or heart disease, an estimated £26.3 billion in 2015. It consumes more than 1% of GDP globally, and this is before you take into account the terrible impact that Alzheimer’s has on the people affected and their families and friends.
The European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) project is a €64 million initiative, funded by the EU and led by the UK, which brings together the best scientists across Europe to tackle this problem. A huge chunk of that funding, over €17 million, comes directly back to us so that we can run elegantly designed clinical studies in carefully selected individuals who may potentially be at risk of Alzheimer’s, but do not yet show signs of the disease. It has now been well established that Alzheimer’s has a long run-in period (called ‘prodromal phase’) before people’s memories and everyday lives become affected, of perhaps ten or even twenty years. This means that long before people go and visit their GP to tell them that they think they might be having some memory problems, Alzheimer’s has begun causing damage to the brain, and it has gone undetected because we simply don’t have a way of knowing that it’s there. It’s invisible to the patients as well as to medical professionals.
Source: World Alzheimer’s Report 2015
Projects such as EPAD represent the best chance we have at identifying the core disease process that we need to target as early as possible with drug treatments, and actually coming up with an answer to this huge devastating problem that affects so many of us. This project benefits from some of the most cutting edge technology that we have, and is able to quickly and reflexively utilise new discoveries that we are making in labs across Europe – some of the science used in EPAD is brand spanking new and couldn't have been done without EU collaborations.
If we were not members of the EU, this project simply wouldn't be happening in its current form. The people involved wouldn't be able to work together, the funding couldn't flow across nations to the institutions that can make the best use of it, and the data and valuable human tissue samples couldn't move between laboratories to where they need to be. And we wouldn't benefit in our Oxford lab from the incredibly gifted European scientists we are so lucky to have. They have inexplicably come to this ridiculously expensive often cold and rainy city, from their beautiful warm wine-filled nations to throw all of their energy at helping us get this done – and it breaks my heart that our country is even having this referendum in the first place.
This is something that I know intimately well because of my current job. I am sure that there are similar collaborations happening in other areas of medicine that also absolutely depend on our position as a strong partner in the EU. And this is quite aside from all the many, many other good reasons to be part of the EU – global political and economic influence, free movement, trade, health, etc.
Brexit is a really terrible idea. Please get out and vote to remain.
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The University of Oxford position on the Referendum is here: Oxford and the EU.
The EPAD project have also made a statement with regards to the EU Referendum, which can be found here: EPAD and EMIF partners voice concern for future of dementia research if Britain leaves EU
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About the Author:
Jennifer Lawson is based at the Oxford University Department of Psychiatry as part of the Translational Neuroscience and Dementia Research Group, working with Professor Simon Lovestone to run clinical trials and observational studies in Alzheimer’s disease.
The opinions expressed here represent her own, and are not those of her employer.
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