Future prospects

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of the matter covered in this text, explores areas of new findings, and proposes directions for further research in the years to come. In it, we note that we expect a continued increase in interest in refinements in diagnosis and assessment. Particularly promising will be the rapid advance in the development of highly specific and powerful drugs with fewer sedative, anticholinergic, extrapyramidal, and hypotensive side effects and that pharmacological interventions will be more useful and pose less danger than in the past, substantially improving quality of life and preserving functions for much longer periods. Promising also will be the emergence of new and more reliable measures that will more definitively define dementia marked behavior and provide indicators for physiological changes associated with dementia. Notwithstanding these areas of promise, we also note the lack of forward-looking health policy and care management research focusing on older adults with dementia and intellectual disabilities and note the need for a greater emphasis in work in this area. Last, we explore the new avenues of information exchange, in particular the World Wide Web, and predict that their contributions to furthering new research and practices will become invaluable to the world-wide network of families, researchers, and workers affected by and interested in this condition.