But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...

"Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.

There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined.

(Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine)

Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"