brain scan
Alzheimer's disease (AD) can be manageable by the year 2025 just like HIV/AIDS accordng to a research institute.everyone's idle/Flickr

The head of Britain's new Dementia Research Institute (DRI), has said that Alzheimer's disease (AD) can be manageable by the year 2025 just like HIV/AIDS.

There are 46.8 million people suffering from dementia worldwide, as per alz.co.uk statistics.

There are chances brain to restore the brain's mental ability once this neurodegenerative disease is halted, Professor Bart De Strooper believes. Strooper is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

"We won't be celebrating in 2025 that dementia is cured, but I hope that by then there will be groups of patients who can be treated in much the same way HIV-Aids is treated today," the world-renowned Belgian neuroscientist told the Press Association.

"I believe it will happen. I'm very optimistic - the brain is the most plastic organ we have. If you could stabilise the disease at an early stage it might be possible to regain part of the function that seems to be lost," he added.

Strooper even said that he would invest a lot of his money to make the next generation think differently about dementia disorders.

"In just the same way Aids in the 1970s and 80s was seen as a terrible doom or punishment of the gods, but is now manageable and treatable. Cancer has gone through a similar process - the way we look at cancer today is quite different from what it was a generation ago. I think we are already further on than many people believe," Strooper said as reported by independent.co.uk.

Strooper conducted numerous researches on Alzheimer's and believes that the disease is not just an outcome of amyloid protein deposition in the brain. He believes that there are other factors too which trigger this incurable ailment.

The amyloid hypothesis was last conducted 25 years back; Strooper conducted a new "amyloid hypothesis" and stated: "Clumps of sticky protein fragments in the brain known as beta-amyloid are at the heart of Alzheimer's" as per an Express report.

So far only Beta-amyloid plaques are known for causing Alzheimer's but their role still remains unclear, according to Strooper. He believes that dementia is way more complicated and is caused by other factors too.

"Dementia is likely to be much more complicated, in a similar way to cancer, which we now know is caused and driven by a multitude of factors. I hope progress in tackling dementia will go faster than it did with cancer.

"At the Institute we will approach dementia as a complicated, multi-factorial disease. Inflammation, biochemistry, cellular changes - all these things are likely to have an influence."

Prof De Strooper's priority is to improve our mechanical understanding of this disease first and then take multiple approaches to deal with the issue.

"Modern medicine is already inherently multi-disciplinary, taking in areas such as genetics, bio-informatics and imaging. I'll be talking to engineers, medical doctors, biologists. We'll be moving from cell cultures to humans and back again," Strooper stated as per the Express report.

He stressed that the Institute would not just be looking at Alzheimer's, but would investigate the whole range of neurodegenerative diseases, including disorders such as Parkinson's and Huntington's, while searching for common factors linking the conditions, he concluded.