We are incredibly grateful to the Halpin Trust for their continued support which has made all the difference. It’s been an exciting journey so far, and initial feedback about DECODE from clinicians and patients has been very positive.
Dr David Llewellyn, Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter Medical School
Helping GPs diagnose dementia more accurately
Thanks to funding from the Halpin Trust, research at the University will improve early diagnosis of dementia and reduce pressure on health services.
Timely diagnosis is key to ensuring people with dementia get the right treatment and support. Although more than 800,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with dementia, many more are never diagnosed, or are diagnosed too late in the progression of the condition for any action to be effective.
Dr David Llewellyn and his team at Exeter are working with Devon Partnership NHS Trust to improve diagnosis. They have developed a clinical decision support system called DECODE
to help identify which patients are most likely to benefit from a full dementia assessment. It will help GPs with the difficult task of assessing which patients should go on to memory clinics within the short consultations available to them.
This system could potentially increase the number of people with dementia who could be diagnosed within a two-year period by over 20%. At the same time, a large proportion of cognitively healthy people could be picked up by the DECODE triage system, and these full dementia assessments could be reduced by up to 400%.