A leading global health expert in dementia is calling on the World Health Organization to make the condition a top world health priority along with cancer, lung disease, diabetes and chronic heart disease.

Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, told the Today programme's Justin Webb that, due to lack of funding and research, dementia could be "the next global health time bomb".

There are misconceptions that dementia is a normal part of aging and that there is nothing that can be done to slow the disease, he said, neither of which was true.

He called on support to be given to the 600 thousand carers of dementia sufferers in the UK and maintained that "the alternative is excluding people with dementia and not giving them life in the end of the years".

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