When my wife was diagnosed I vowed to stop dementia in its tracks, says Sir Jackie Stewart
WHEN ex-racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart discovered his wife Helen had dementia, he was shocked to learn there was no cure for it.
Even worse, there was little hope on the horizon.
Since that day in 2014, the Formula One legend has dedicated his life to finding a breakthrough, with the same determination he once showed on the track.
The “Flying Scot” tells Fab Daily: “When I was told Helen had dementia and there was no cure, I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, especially when you look at the number of people in the world who have it’.
“For every person born in the world today, one in three will develop dementia.”
So instead of giving up, he founded Race Against Dementia to champion out-of-the-box thinking and to find a working treatment.
Now scientists, backed by his charity and a £1million grant from vacuum cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson’s foundation, believe a drug to halt the disease is ten years away.
Although it may come too late to help Sir Jackie’s wife of 59 years, it promises to transform the lives of millions across the globe.
He says: “I created Race Against Dementia to break new ground. I didn’t want to be involved in yesterday’s technology. I wanted to look at things in a different way.
“In Formula One, problem-solving is done faster than anywhere else. A car can get fixed at lightning speed. In my day, if I had a puncture it could take two minutes to fix. It now happens in 1.7 seconds. That is Formula One. This is the culture I want to bring to the medical world.”
UK’s biggest killer
The three-time F1 world champ married Helen, 79, in 1962. They have two sons and nine grandchildren.
But after she had an unexplained car crash in 2014, despite the road being clear, her family began suspecting something was amiss.
Later that year, she was diagnosed with dementia after a routine check-up.
Sir Jackie, 82, says: “We had no idea Helen had dementia. But certain things started to happen. She had a road accident, for example. No one else was involved and it was on a fairly safe stretch of road and the weather was good. There was no reason to crash.
“Helen was my original pit-lane girl, my professional stopwatch and would time my laps to the millisecond. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world, and still is.
“I have watched her change before my eyes over the past few years. Her razor-sharp mind was one of the things I fell in love with. But it is her mind that is vanishing.
“If I have to travel somewhere, she asks me ten times a day where I am going or where I have been.
“Her mobility is no longer there and she has very little recall or short-term memory. It’s beginning to affect her long-term memory, too.
“We try to give her the best quality of life we can. I’m very lucky. Because of my racing career, we have nurses looking after Helen, two at a time, 24 hours a day.
“But few people can afford that so their loved ones end up going into a home. It’s a terrible illness and for families with loved ones going through this, it’s very difficult.
“First, they lose their memory. Then they can’t walk or even go to the toilet on their own.
“People don’t fully understand it until they have to live with it. There isn’t any medicine to slow it down or to stop it happening. That is what we need.”
In just three years’ time, it is estimated that more than a million people in the UK will be living with dementia.
This comes as research from University College London has warned that the numbers of older adults with early signs of mental decline has trebled in a decade.
Despite dementia being the UK’s biggest single killer, there is currently no effective treatment to tackle the brain-wasting disease.
But that could all soon change thanks to “game-changing” research led by Dr Claire Durrant.
Supported by Sir Jackie and the James Dyson Foundation, she has taken some of the most detailed-ever images of a living human brain.
Technology guru Sir James — famous for his Dyson company’s bagless vacuums — was inspired to help find a cure for dementia due to his friendship with Sir Jackie.
Dr Durrant’s pictures might look like a riotously colourful constellation of stars or a long-lost work by artist Jackson Pollock, but they are snapshots of the inner workings of our minds.
The captured green dots are synapses — brain cells “talking” to each other — which are 25,000 times smaller than a grain of sand.
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With the help of her pioneering “brain slice” technique, Edinburgh University-based Dr Durrant now predicts a drug that can halt Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia, is less than a decade away.
Speaking to The Sun, the Race Against Dementia Dyson Fellow says: “We have a really good shot at this, and in the next ten years we’ll hopefully have something that at least helps slow the disease. Hopefully soon after, we’ll have something that cures it. I’m looking at a ten-year horizon.”
Dr Durrant’s pioneering approach is bringing fresh hope to an age-old problem. It relies on brain tumour patients donating small samples of healthy tissue following surgery.
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These are then thinly sliced and kept alive to be analysed under powerful microscopes.
Most current dementia research is carried out on mice and can take years to translate into humans, if ever. Or scientists probe donated brains from dead dementia patients.
GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH
Dr Durrant hopes directly testing living human brain tissue will finally reveal the underlying causes of — and potential cures for — the disease.
She says: “We’re not mice. A lot of the kind of research we’ve done previously has been looking at limited changes in mouse models. Or, at the other end of the scale, looking at brains donated by people who’ve died from Alzheimer’s — which is a really useful tool but a bit like arriving on the scene of a car crash after it’s happened.
“You can kind of guess what might have happened but are not seeing it happening in real time.
“Hopefully this can be the main workhorse of what we do going forward, replacing work with mice and post-mortem human brains.”
Key to Dr Durrant’s technique is seeing how human brain tissue reacts when exposed to potential triggers and certain drugs.
She says: “The thing about these living brain slices is that we can test things in real time and watch how brain cells respond to changes we think might cause Alzheimer’s, or to drugs we think might help prevent the disease. So there’s this platform that allows us to experiment with living human brain, without obviously experimenting on living humans. What I hope to show is the earliest changes in the disease.”
Sir James was so excited by the work, he donated £1million to speed it along.
As a result, the team has more than doubled in size, and increased the amount of brain tissue available for research by up to ten-fold.
Sir James says: “Claire has done extraordinary things. What she is doing is counter-culture. She is going about her work in an extremely new and interesting way. She is pioneering.
“I have seen how tragic dementia can be. It’s a disease that is rising and the Government has reneged on its promise to up spending on dementia. In fact, it has reduced spending. That is why I was keen to help.”
But that is not where the collaboration ends.
EARLY SYMPTOMS OF DEMENTIA
Many can appear years before a diagnosis of dementia.
They include:
- Memory loss
- Difficulty concentrating
- Finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks, such as getting confused over the correct change
- Struggling to follow a conversation or find the right word
- Being confused about time and place
- Mood swings
Dr Durrant’s next step involves examining samples at scale — under microscopes normally used in Dyson’s battery research, and alongside a team of Sir James’s engineers.
He says of the microscopes: “They allow us to see what is going on at a molecular level, which is important in a battery but also in a brain. Claire has been bringing down samples so we can analyse them using our equipment.
“It’s a wonderful example of our engineers being able to work in a totally different field, to help with such vital research.”
The Alzheimer’s Society estimates 1.6million people in the UK will be living with dementia by 2040, and the annual bill is expected to soar from £35billion now, to £94billion in less than two decades.
But government research spending on the condition is down to just £75million a year – around 0.2 per cent of the cost of dementia.
Dr Durrant says: “You don’t have to be a statistician to say those figures don’t add up. We need to do something to tackle what’s a huge social, emotional, medical and economic problem that’s going to ruin our country.
“We need to be doing that at pace and thinking differently to how we’ve done things before. This is an urgent problem. It’s been on the back burner too long.”
Above all else, it is the human loss that drives Dr Durrant and others in her field.
She says: “Dementia is as big a health crisis as Covid, certainly in terms of cost to the economy and cost to life. Huge numbers of people are dying.”
But she added: “I’m very optimistic we will find, if not a cure for Alzheimer’s, something that slows it and makes it more liveable with.
"Nine out of ten dementia scientists agree we will find some cure. It’s such a cruel disease that can rob people of some of their best years and precious memories."
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“If we can protect those even for five or ten years, even at the very late stages, then that’s a huge increase in quality of life for so many people.
“That’s people being able to be part of society. That’s grandparents meeting their grandchildren.”
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