Best-selling British author Terry Pratchett, who is battling Alzheimer's disease, has donated one million dollars towards research into the debilitating brain disease, he said Thursday.
Pratchett, 59, whose fantastic fiction Discworld books have sold 55 million copies worldwide, said insufficient funds and the perception that Alzheimer's was a "fairly quiet" disease compared to cancer were stalling efforts to discover more about it.
Funding for Alzheimer's research in Britain was only about three percent of the amount spent on fighting cancer, he told BBC radio.
"If like me you have a rare variant the (British) national health service really isn't set up to deal with you."
But he said low funding for Alzheimer's care and research "was not the fault of politicians, it's how we see the diseases."
"There is a kind of heroic glamour about the battle against cancer. We use the language 'the battlefield,' or there is a battle, whereas frankly with Alzheimer's it is a lot of skirmishing," he said.
"I don't think any cure is going to be discovered in my lifetime... but I think there might be a regime, some combination of lifestyle and drugs which helps people live with Alzheimer's."
Pratchett said that while he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's two and a half years ago, its effects were only just starting, most noticeably his typing had slowed.
But his prolific literary output continues.
"A few hours ago I pressed the button and sent my last novel -- not my last ever novel I hope, but the last one I've completed -- to my publishers in the UK and the US, but I have started the next novel," he said.
His Discworld books are set in a flat universe balanced on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on a giant turtle.
Alzheimer's is a progressive and fatal brain disease striking the elderly.
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AFP 131122 GMT 03 08
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