IN the spring, the Big Lottery's Life Changes Trust will announce who has secured a share of £3 million funding for work creating dementia-friendly communities.

The fund, announced in September has been heavily oversubscribed.

The idea of helping society adapt to rising levels of dementia, by making services, buildings and transport better suited to their needs and the general public more aware, is all the rage.

A new book from the University of Stirling's Dementia Services Development Centre explains how to create such environments, offering 10 helpful hints for organising a community to be more supportive of those living with dementia.

Tips include making sure you involve people with dementia in your ideas, not forgetting about carers and understanding what is available in your community, so that you make the best use of supports that are already available.

However evidence-based policy is also flavour of the month, and the spring will also see an report summarising current research on dementia friendly communities.

I'm told this will be a far from convincing verdict and that the jury is still out on whether they make much difference at all to the overall experience of the dementia sufferer.

In fact, despite a steady flow of reports and policy statements on dementia, there still seem to be big gaps in what we know.

Take pharmaceuticals, for instance. Last week the BMJ reported anti-psychotic drugs are widely being used not for the serious mental illness the drugs were licensed for, but instead to treat older people for the symptoms of dementia, despite the risk of dangerous side-effects for this group.

Women were more likely to be prescribed them than men, and people aged 80 and over were more than twice as likely to be treated with an antipsychotic as those aged 40-49.

Only between 36 per cent and 60 per cent of those treated with various first and second generation drugs had the symptoms of a psychotic illness or bipolar disorder.

That seems alarming, but the research was carried out between 2007 and 2011, when a campaign began to cut the use of such drugs, as a "chemical cosh", particularly in care homes. How effective has that campaign been? We don't really know.

Is dementia a timebomb threatening to overwhelm our social and health services? Or it is being solved, by initiatives from dietary interventions to reshaping communities?

Neither is accurate. But with the needs of people with dementia set to remain prominent in the year ahead, this is an area where we can't afford for policy to be anything other than firmly evidence-based.