Funding the fight against Alzheimer’s

By Debbie Jones

Twenty years ago, I was busy raising two small children but had no idea of how my life was going to change forever.

My mother, age 62, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. After watching this disease destroy her mind and eventually her body, I made it my goal and passion to never forget the burden of living with this disease.

Today, as many as

5.3 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease, and it's expected to impact 16 million lives by 2050, according to the Alzheimer's Association's 2009 Facts and Figures report. The bipartisan Alzheimer's Study Group says that Alzheimer's could cost our government as much as $20 trillion by midcentury while it destroys and eventually ends millions of lives.

Included in these staggering statistics are 65,000 Iowans living with Alzheimer's; the estimate is as many as 77,000 by 2025.

With an emerging baby boomer generation at higher risk for developing Alzheimer's, the nation is unprepared to deal with an Alzheimer epidemic. Any effort at health care reform remains incomplete if solving the Alzheimer crisis isn't included.

Alzheimer's doesn't just impact the individual; it also cripples families who can quickly become overwhelmed by the caregiving demands of the disease.

For the last six years, federal Alzheimer research funding has declined in real terms while the loss of lives and costs to Medicare and Medicaid continue to soar.

At the Alzheimer's Association's 2009 International Conference on Alzheimer's disease (ICAD), the world's foremost scientists discussed advances in scientific research being pursued on a variety of fronts - from new drugs and diagnostic tools to ways we can all evaluate and reduce our risk. Increased investment in Alzheimer research is more critical than ever.

Join me in asking Congress to increase Alzheimer research funding today so we have the treatments we desperately need tomorrow. Research funding must match the current and future impact of this disease or the human and financial toll will be devastating.

Strides that scientists are making may be undercut if research funding continues to languish.

It may be too late for my mom but we must do it for others who now or in the future will be touched and changed forever by this wicked disease. Wouldn't it be wonderful to some day have a world without Alzheimer's?

Debbie Jones of Cedar Rapids serves on the Public Policy Committee of the National Alzheimer's Association board of directors and is president of the Alzheimer's Association East Central Iowa Chapter.