Congress is moving backward on funding for Alzheimer's disease research
At first, Alzheimer's patients forget only small things, recent events. As the disease progresses, it kills parts of the brain where memories of yesterday are stored, then the memories of last week, last year. Over time the forgetting expands. At the final stages, parents forget their children, husbands forget their wives. When I worked at a nursing home for people with memory disorders, I learned that a person with Alzheimer's may retain her sense of humor, her capacity for joy, her preferences for pecan pie, all while forgetting the basic outline of her own life.
I lead a research team focused on Alzheimer's disease, mostly funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). I have loved ones with Alzheimer's, so my work is personal. I know my work is not likely to cure the people I love in time — but I hope to contribute to the science that does find a cure, or better yet, a way to prevent anyone from ever developing Alzheimer's.
Early in my career, progress felt painfully slow. Back then, the budget for all of the National Institutes of Health — including NIA and institutes funding research on cancer, heart disease, children's health or any other health topic — amounted to about $95 per person in the U.S. The portion for NIA was about $3.60 per American. You read that right: The average amount that everyone in the U.S. contributed to research on older adults for the entire year averaged less than a kid's weekly allowance. NIA rejected over 8 out of 10 new research ideas, many very promising ideas, because there simply wasn't enough money. In 2011, Congress passed a law prioritizing Alzheimer's and other diseases that cause dementia (like Parkinson's disease). Congress told NIA to send out a call for researchers to focus on prevention and cures for these conditions. NIA did just that and the scientific community rapidly responded with increased research on Alzheimer's and dementia.
And that research is paying off. I am an inveterate complainer (ask my family), but I'll admit — we are making real progress. What have we learned? Multiple disease processes work together and must combine to cause dementia. This offers more opportunities to prevent dementia. Many things people can do — starting in youth (stay in school) and extending through older age (get that cataract surgery your doctor recommended) — seem to delay dementia. Two medications were approved to slow the progression of memory loss in early Alzheimer's patients. Some drugs used for other diseases, like diabetes or hypertension, also may help prevent dementia. We are testing these hypotheses, trying to prove whether these strategies really work and find even more ways to slow or prevent dementia.
And what is the cost of this progress? Last year, the entire National Institutes of Health budget was about $139 per U.S. resident, with 5% of that dedicated to Alzheimer's research. That amounts to each of us chipping in about $7 per year to end Alzheimer's. As a researcher and a family member, I want to say: Thank you, America.
But Congress appears to have forgotten all of this progress. The new proposed federal budget slashes investments in health research overall, with about 40% less money for NIH. Under the new budget, we expect that over 96% of grant proposals on Alzheimer's would be rejected due to lack of funding.
Do our representatives think we would prefer an extra $3.50 per year instead of more progress toward curing Alzheimer's disease? I made a promise to never forget the people I love whose minds have been decayed by this disease. I wonder if the politicians who voted for this budget don't know anyone affected by Alzheimer's or if they have just forgotten what it's like to lose someone to dementia.
I hope you will join me in fighting to preserve funding to end Alzheimer's disease and for research to improve the health of all Americans. As a person in Oklahoma, your voice counts more than residents of almost any other state because Oklahoma representatives are very conservative. If Oklahomans speak out to support health research, the nation will listen.
Maria Glymour began her science career in Kinta, Oklahoma, in Mr. Hall's classroom, trying to reconstruct a possum skeleton. Now she is a professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Why is Alzheimer's research being ignored by Congress? | Opinion
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