An injection capable of halting the progress of Alzheimer’s could be available to patients within a decade, Britain’s leading dementia organisation predicts.

The Alzheimer’s Society says a series of recent breakthroughs in treatments that disrupt harmful genes has brought scientists to a “tipping point” in their fight against the disease.

For decades, researchers have sought without success a treatment for Alzheimer’s based on targeting damaging proteins that build up in the brain.

However, the “remarkable” results of a recent trial which set out to silence the troublesome genes which regulate proteins in children with a rare spinal condition, has convinced scientists they could adopt the same approach in people at high risk of dementia

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dr James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said an injection to the spine which prevents certain forms of the disease taking hold could be available in under 10 years.

The treatment, using so-called “molecular scissors”, would not alter a person’s fundamental genetic code, but rather the way specific genes known to play a role in dementia communicate.

Such a drug would principally benefit around 18,000 people in the UK with a high risk of hereditary Alzheimer’s, approximately 2 per cent of the overall population of those with the degenerative disease.