USA2 Spotlight

Mark Your Calendar: How would you spend $1 billion to stop Alzheimer’s?! On November 18th from 4:00-5:00pm Eastern, George Vradenburg and ResearchersAgainstAlzheimer’s will host an expert Webinar, exploring what is needed to find a cure for this cruel disease. The presentation will include recommendations from key opinion leaders in the field on how to fix a broken and siloed system. Join us as we discuss and debate insights on the changes needed across the drug development spectrum — from basic science to the clinic and the market. Please RSVP by November 16th to Sarah Kwon at [email protected]. Call-in information will be provided upon RSVP.

A November 5, 2015 Boston Globe article included interviews with Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and UsA2 co-founder Trish Vradenburg about their efforts to bring Alzheimer’s out of the shadows through Vradenburg’s play "Surviving Grace." According to the article, “There are so many misconceptions around Alzheimer’s, Vradenburg says. ‘The biggest one is that no one dies of Alzheimer’s,’ she says. ‘But they do. My mother died of pneumonia, but it was pneumonia caused by Alzheimer’s. Confronting these things helps us accept them and then fight them.’” Also highlighted by a November 9 Boston Globe piece.

New Report: UsAgainstAlzheimer’s partnered with Argentum, the largest  association of senior living communities, to develop the Unraveling Alzheimer’s Disease Report released in October. The report is based on a panel held at the ALFA Senior Living Executive Conference that “addressed challenges and opportunities and urged the senior living industry to harness its significant role and potential to take, encourage, and echo action in the fight against Alzheimer’s.” Download and read the report here.

Must Reads

A November 9, 2015 The Guardian article reported on the rising cost of personalized care for individuals with dementia in the UK. According to the article, “Carers have been left to pick up the pieces of our broken social care system. Prospective care home residents face a financial minefield. Where I stayed, private funders pay a weekly rate of more than £1,000 and need to show two years’ worth of fees stashed away. If funded by the local council, at £580 per week, the resident is asked if they can top up the difference. Applications for any additional funding are appallingly complex, take hours to fill in and are thrust on family carers at a time of great stress. The shelving of the Dilnot cap on care costs was a blow to many with dementia and their families who often depend on many years of care home support. It’s time for us, as a society, to accept that the financial limitations we put on the funding of care inflict real pain on people. So far, the dedication and goodwill of underpaid staff has allowed the system to continue. But, as numbers of people with dementia increase, the system is increasingly exposed as broken. We can no longer ignore the crisis and continue to put such a price on personalised care. It is the individuals and their families we must consider. It could be you, it could be me – it was my dad.”

A November 8, 2015 Bloomberg View article by Paula Dwyer highlighted growing GOP support for funding medical research with a focus on cures. According to Dwyer, “It seems some Republicans are betraying conservative dogma -- perhaps most emphatically pushed by Cruz -- that says government agencies are inept and federal spending inane. But the cures caucus makes eminent sense. The goal is an eventual reduction in federal spending on expensive health-care programs by reducing the incidence of killer diseases. The bulk of Medicare and Medicaid expenditures go toward treating chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and diabetes. Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia alone eat up 68 percent…But there may be something even more fundamental going on here: Promising an all-out effort to find cures has special appeal to a Republican base whose demographic skews older and sicker. Indeed, life expectancy of Americans in red states is slipping below that of blue states, a new study by economists at the New York Federal Reserve Bank shows.”

A November 6, 2015 Breitbart.com opinion piece by former Governor Mike Huckabee highlighted his commitment to finding cures for Alzheimer’s and other costly diseases. According to Huckabee, “Alzheimer’s will cost us $1.1 trillion by the year 2050. I lost my mother-in-law to this horrible disease and the only thing worse than the financial cost is the emotional pain. Heart disease and stroke cost us $313 billion each year in healthcare and lost productivity. Diabetes treatment and management is approaching $500 billion annually. Imagine how much time, money, and agony we could save ourselves if we cured these tragic diseases? Medicare reimburses trillions to treat diseases but not a penny to prevent or cure them. It’s backwards!…Billions are thrown away each year on politically-motivated pet projects like ‘gun disease’ prevention, drunken monkey research, coffee enemas, sexual studies, and junk science that doesn’t improve the lives of hurting Americans. Some estimate that 50 percent of all NIH funding is squandered by bureaucracy, overhead, waste and duplication. Imagine the Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and diabetes breakthroughs we could achieve if we invested the wasted $15 billion in tax dollars each year to find cures?”