Deaths caused by dementia in Scotland have risen by more than 20% in a year, according to official statistics.
Provisional quarterly figures show 1,877 people died from forms of the disease between January and April.
National Records of Scotland (NRS) data shows the figure is up from 1,537 during the same period in 2016 - an increase of 22%.
Dr Matthew Norton, director of policy at Alzheimer's Research UK, said: "These statistics underline yet again the urgent need to tackle this devastating condition.
"Age is the biggest risk factor for dementia and our ageing population is driving increases in the numbers of people living with and dying from the condition - but dementia is not an inevitable part of ageing and these figures must galvanise efforts to defeat the condition through research.
"Unless we can find treatments able to fight diseases like Alzheimer's, this challenge will only worsen.
"Advances in medicine have helped deliver increasing life expectancy, but to ensure people can live healthily as they grow older we need to see similar progress in the fight against dementia."
Part of the increase has been attributed to a change in NRS death coding software, but Dr Norton claimed this would only account for a small proportion of the rise.
Figures from the Scottish Government department's report show Alzheimer's disease accounted for 648 of the deaths - up from 495 last year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here