How to keep the brain healthy

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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. Disorders of the brain are a growing worry.

Twelve mental-health conditions affect about 970m people around the world according to the Global Burden of Disease Project: more than one in ten of the population. Patchy data mean that this figure could well be an underestimate. On top of that, neurological problems, such as stroke, dementia, migraine, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and brain injury are collectively the leading global source of disability.

Ageing populations with unhealthy ways of life are likely to make this problem much worse everywhere. In an ideal world science would be coming to the rescue. But the brain is a complex organ—sometimes described as the most complex structure in the known universe.

Through good fortune and subsequent diligence, 20th-century science provided some pharmacological tools with which to treat some of the things that go wrong with it. But its fundamental mysteries have proved difficult to unravel. As a result, progress has been much slower than in treatments for the heart or cancer.

Indeed, it has sometimes been hard to discern much progress at all. The private sector spent an estimated $43bn on research into therapies for Alzheimer’s disease between 1998 and 2017 and came up empty-handed. That epic failure is perhaps the biggest reason why, in the 2010s, many drug firms abandoned or cut back on neuroscience research.

Happily, there are signs of a change afoot. In our Technology Quarterly this week we report on a renaissance in neuroscience, with many drug companies, some of them big ones, showing renewed interest in the field. This fresh energy is coming