State of the art

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and Huntington’s are debilitating and untreatable conditions strongly linked with age. In these disorders, the dementias are responsible for the greatest burden of the disease. They affect over 7 million people in the European Union (EU) and these numbers are expected to double every 20 years as the population ages. It currently costs approximately 130 billion of euros per year to care for people with dementia across Europe. This highlights age-related neurodegenerative diseases as one of the leading medical and societal challenges faced by the EU society. For this reason the EU has promoted in Horizon 2020, the biggest EU research programme ever, one social challenge devoted to health, demographic change and wellbeing, where research in neurodegenerative diseases has been highlighted as one of the main objectives of research and innovation. 

The amount of existing early diagnosis protocols and treatments for neurodegenerative diseases is very limited. As therapies are focused only in treating the symptoms, rather than addressing the cause, they usually provide modest benefit in the patient, and have little impact on the progression of the disease. Conversely, the early detection and identification of the disease would permit the development of treatments oriented to modify its evolution.