Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that new dementia treatments can be deemed cost-effective by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, in the light of the investment required to scale up diagnostics.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) makes recommendations for the National Health Service on whether new medicines should be routinely funded by the NHS, based on an assessment of their costs and benefits. The NHS in England is legally required to fund NICE-recommended medicines, normally within three months of the publication of final guidance. The NICE only recommends medicines that offer additional health benefits to patients and their carers, and demonstrate value for money for the taxpayer.

The NICE is currently evaluating two new licensed disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and has been unable to recommend them in its draft guidance. The NICE concluded that the relatively small benefits they provide balanced against the overall cost of providing the treatments, including intensive monitoring for serious side effects, means that they cannot currently be considered good value for the taxpayer. However, the NICE has not yet published final guidance and will take the comments received in response to its draft guidance fully into account in developing its final recommendations.

A number of other disease-modifying treatments for dementia are in late-stage development and are expected to come to market in the next few years. To prepare for the new generation of dementia treatments in development, NHS England is working to ensure that diagnostic and treatment capacity, and clinical pathway redesign and investment are in place to support the adoption of any new licensed and NICE recommended treatments as soon as possible.

The Government will transform the NHS from a late diagnosis, late treatment health service, to one that catches illness earlier and prevents it in the first place. We will also put Britain at the forefront of transforming treatment for dementia by backing more research into the disease. Part of this will be ensuring that we support manufacturers to develop products that are potentially cost effective to implement, and that new treatments assessed as clinically and cost effective are rolled out in a safe and timely way.

The Department funds dementia research via the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Alongside Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, and the People’s Postcode Lottery, the NIHR is funding the Blood Biomarker Challenge which seeks to produce the clinical and economic data that could make the case for the use of a blood test in the NHS to support diagnosis of dementia.