The earlier that someone is diagnosed with dementia, the more options for treatment and care are available, ensuring that they find the right residential care home arrangement for them.
However, the slow progression of dementia means that it is not always easy to discover the early warning signs that give you time to consider your options.
This could potentially be about to change, thanks to advances in diagnostic technology and medical research made possible by the UK Biobank, the world’s largest medical imaging project.
The UK Biobank project is an extensive set of full-body medical images taken of over 100,000 volunteers, which helps to provide significant insight into a huge number of health conditions and how they affect the body as we age.
This anonymised data is then made available for researchers, laboratories and clinics to help their research, which has led to 1300 studies and countless medical breakthroughs over the past ten years, including a diagnostics tool that can predict future heart issues in less than a second.
One of the biggest is a diagnostic tool that analyses activity data and brain scans with the help of a specialist machine learning algorithm against a wide range of training data to detect brain conditions at an early stage, with an accuracy comparable to existing diagnostic tools typically used once it has progressed.
The study suggests that it can predict dementia, as well as Parkinson’s disease, before a person even notices any symptoms, which could be a huge transformative step to ensure that people get any potential care they need as soon as they need it.
One caveat is that it was a preliminary study, requiring a much larger group to confirm the findings, but as with any other progressive condition, there are more options for treatment the earlier it is diagnosed, which can prolong a higher quality of life. | 
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