Research Roundup

Dementia due to brain diseases such as Alzheimer's affects 55 million people, and in the year 2019 alone, represented a cost of US $1.3 trillion globally. This is cited by Daly (2023), who focuses in this paper on the neuroethics of dementia in the context of prevention.

Daly seeks to enrich the discussion of risk factors for later-life amnestic dementia by considering the brain's relationship with its environment across a person's lifetime, and he is especially interested in deprivation, which he understands to be any lack of environmental resources leading to an unmet need: ‘[t]here are three kinds of deprivation that the brain might experience that are most relevant to dementia: sensorimotor, social, and socioeconomic.’ Daly argues that deprivation is an ‘independent and overlooked risk factor for dementia that invites upstream action against inequalities.’

Daly notes that research and policymaking in relation to dementia risk reduction have thus far concentrated almost exclusively on how individuals' health behaviours change their risk profile. This lifestyle-centred focus, asserts Daly, poses ethical challenges and is therapeutically inadequate. Future prevention guidelines, he argues, should explicitly identify deprivation as a risk factor and should develop around the need for a fairer society. ‘Meanwhile, interventions and discourse based on lifestyle modification should respect the principle of “no ought without support.”’