The US president, Barack Obama, has announced an increase in funding for Alzheimer’s disease next year of $106m (£67m; €80m), a 24% rise over the current $450m a year.

The announcement came shortly after scientists gathered at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in New York to try to determine how best to spot Alzheimer’s disease in the “silent years” before the disease is apparent.

Reisa Sperling, director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, said, “The pathophysiology begins more than a decade before dementia . . . We are trying to define the earliest markers for the ‘iceberg’ silent years when preclinical changes are …