Building bridges between neuroscientific evidence and policy

Costs associated with brain diseases (eg, treatment) in Europe are similar to the combined associated costs for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.6 Health-prevention strategies and policies that would help to prevent or delay brain disease need to be implemented for economic sustainability.7 Cutbacks to financial funding for neuroscience have raised concerns about future drug development for brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, depression, and schizophrenia: several pharmaceutical companies have stopped their drug development programmes for these disorders.8 Innvær and colleagues9 reviewed 24 studies of health policymakers and their use of research evidence. [...]policymakers often have difficulty understanding scientific evidence and struggle to contextualise it, especially because many scientists think more in terms of answering a question than in terms of applying such knowledge for action.