Professor Matthew Kiernan

But I think what we've got to do is try and turn that around as a community and say, well, we're focusing on brain health.

We want optimal brain function, and we want to get into it early, and we want to maintain it throughout the course of your life.

So wouldn't it be great if people started going to their general practitioners at the age of 30 and had a brain health check?

to prevent dementia and neurodegeneration in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

We don't know how long we're going to live for, but it's still going upwards.

So I think that we can try and encourage a more healthy approach to brain health.

Well, you've already articulated the main ones currently, but this is a rapidly evolving landscape.

So, for instance, at Neuroscience Research Australia, we've formed a partnership with Roche Diagnostics Platform.

And part of the reason for that is to get blood biomarkers as a Medicare item number so that people can go to their GP and have all of these.

Get done for free.

Yeah.

And that's where it's going to be.

That's going to be in the next five to 10 years.

Right.

There's been a huge study in the UK and they've taken blood and clinical examinations from 50,000 people.

And they've gone back to the blood biomarkers and they've shown that if five particular proteins in the blood go up, about 10 years before Alzheimer's disease develops.

And that's where we're going to be going.

So we're going to be testing these in healthy individuals, and then we can start to treat against these blood biomarkers to try and maximize brain health.

It's not here at the present, but there's a lot of work going on right now.

At the moment, you can't, but that's exactly, so this sort of diagnostic pathway is to be doing amyloid and tau for Alzheimer's disease, TDP43 for motor neurone disease and frontotemporal dementia, alpha-synuclein for Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease.