USA2 SPOTLIGHT

A February 2, 2015 USA2 statement expressed disappointment in the Obama Administration’s FY 2016 Budget proposal. According to USA2 Chairman George Vradenburg, "I’m pleased to see an overall bump in funding for the National Institutes of Health and I’m eager to learn more about how the BRAIN and precision medicine initiatives will benefit patients with Alzheimer’s…But it’s distressing that the Administration did not push for more resources for Alzheimer’s disease research as it has done in the past.  If we as a nation do not make Alzheimer’s research a top priority, we simply cannot meet our national goal of preventing and treating Alzheimer’s by 2025.”

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A February 4, 2015 The Detroit News article profiled Don and Cindy Beller's struggles with early onset Alzheimer's. According to the article, "Don and Cindy Beller were high school sweethearts, both raised in Northville. They attended Michigan State University; Cindy became a paralegal, and Don, who got his law degree from the University of Detroit, specialized in property easement or right-of-way law. They married in 1973 and raised their two children in Sterling Heights. Don's memory lapses and repetitive questions started to become apparent shortly after he turned 50, Cindy said. The following year, in 2000, he was diagnosed at Henry Ford Hospital…In 2003, Don acquiesced and the couple told their families, and their son and daughter. While scientists are still studying genetic risk factors in early onset Alzheimer's, the Beller's children, now both in their 30s, chose not to undergo genetic counseling. Don is the first to have developed the disease in the family.In 2004, Don stopped working. He lived for six more years. Cindy waited until the last year of his life to hire help in the home. In retrospect, she said she should have gotten help sooner because of the toll it took on her. "You become angry, resentful and you're worried about everything," she said. "On top of that, you are wracked with guilt, because then you look at what they are going through.""

A February 3, 2015 Genengnews.com article reported that President Obama's 2016 budget proposal includes a three percent increase for NIH and a small bump for Alzheimer's research funding. According to the article, "Obama is seeking $31.311 billion in overall program level funding for NIH, up 3.3% or an even $1 billion from the current fiscal year. However, the proposed NIH budget would more than double spending on the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, to $135 million from $65 million in FY2015; while adding $50 million or 8.5% to NIH spending for Alzheimer’s disease research, which would rise to $635 million; and adding $20 million or 24% to Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), bringing that program to $105 million."

A February 3, 2015 Washington Post article reported that "patients experiencing pain near the end of life increased 11 percent between 1998 and 2010, according to a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine." According to the article, "Still, end-of-life care is naturally an unpleasant thing to plan for, and Lynn points out there's little in pop culture that force us to confront the challenges we face in our final years. That's why Alzheimer's patient advocates have been highlighting the critically acclaimed new movie "Still Alice," which depicts a linguistics professor struck with early on-set Alzheimer's. If anything, Lynn said she hopes her research will be a wake-up call to focus not only on finding new cures for diseases, like dementia and Alzheimer's, but to find better ways of making patients comfortable at the end."