It cannot have escaped our readers' notice that there has been a public increase in the awareness of the impact of dementia on people's lives: politicians have raised concerns about a dementia ‘time bomb’ as a greater number of people live to an older age; and even the 2013 G8 summit declared1 that there was a need for international initiatives to tackle this illness. The inevitable call for more research is underscored by the lack of any new licenced medications for Alzheimer's disease since 2002. There has been much interest in a putative role for statins – which inhibit the HMGCR enzyme, the rate-limiting step in cholesterol production – as retrospective epidemiological data have shown that they can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease by up to 70%; but, frustratingly, administration of these drugs to those with the illness appears to produce little benefit. Recent data have now shown that the gene encoding this HMGCR enzyme is a potent modifier for the age at onset and rate of conversion from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease.2 Indeed, this work would indicate that its G-negative allele is second only to APOE2 as the most common and important protective genetic variant for spontaneous Alzheimer's disease.

June 27 this year was the day that funding was approved for San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge physical suicide deterrent barrier (www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org). This follows over 1400 suicides since the bridge's opening in 1937: a morbid record 46 were in 2013 alone, possibly exacerbated by the global economic crisis. The barrier is in place to prevent the end-point of suicidal behaviour (physically preventing suicide) but how much effort is going into the examination of the external factors that drive such behaviour? Aleman & Denys argue that psychiatry has failed to tackle suicide as a disease entity in its own right, instead relegating the act of deliberately ending one's life to a symptom or consequence of an underlying psychiatric illness. They note that in DSM-5 suicidality is only mentioned as a symptom of borderline personality disorder and mood disorders, despite this presenting as the most prominent psychiatric emergency. They argue for a more experimental approach based on the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtml) that emphasises the study of psychiatric phenomena with reference to their underlying mechanisms: in this case, processing of negative valence, context and response selection, and mechanisms to regulate arousal.