Must reads

• A September 9, 2014 Forbes article highlighted Meryl Comer's Slow Dancing with a Stranger and the impact of Alzheimer's on women. According to the article, "If Alzheimer’s is about forgetting, Comer’s just released book, Slow Dancing with a Stranger, is about bearing witness to everything Alzheimer’s took from her husband and her family. Equally important, it’s a call to action for women who, as caregivers, are most often Alzheimer’s second victim. What distresses Comer is that there are no better options for women today around care than there were 20 years ago. There are still no disease-modifying drugs or treatments for Alzheimer’s, a fatal neurodegenerative disease that has no cure...If Comer’s work has made her a public face in the fight against Alzheimer’s (she is also co-founder of WomenAgainstAlzheimers), her new book Slow Dancing with a Stranger reveals the more personal side of her journey as caregiver to her husband and, more recently, also to her aging mother."
• A September 9, 2014 Portland Press Herald editorial advocated for the use of tracking systems to help manage Alzheimer's wandering. According to the editorial, "The issues with diagnosis, care and costs related to Alzheimer’s disease are as difficult to solve as they are troubling. But wandering can be mitigated, simply and inexpensively, through programs that are now being used in some Maine communities and should be considered elsewhere.One of these programs, known as The Wanderers Database, is coming to four central Maine communities...If that person disappears, police can instantly call up and disseminate photographs and personal and medical information, allowing for a faster, more effective search…Alzheimer’s disease must be reckoned with in the coming years, in Maine as much as anywhere else. The number of Alzheimer’s cases in Maine, the nation’s oldest state, is expected to increase by almost 45 percent in the next six years alone.That comes with many long-term challenges, from attracting enough caregivers to figuring out how to pay for the astronomical Medicare costs associated with the disease. But with the tracking programs so readily available, the danger, and the anguish, presented by wandering can be abated now."
• A September 8, 2014 The Hill opinion piece by Jim Greenwood called for "the development and execution of a large-scale, longitudinal study to sequence the genomes of 100,000 volunteers in age cohorts from those in their 20s through those in their 80s, obtain biospecimens and additional health care data from those individuals, and develop biological markers that may predict Alzheimer’s or other chronic diseases for which the cause is unknown or poorly understood." According to Greenwood, "This large-scale, long-range study will not only yield data necessary to find ways to cure and prevent Alzheimer’s, it would help researchers find ways to treat hundreds of other diseases for which we still lack adequate therapies…The urgency of finding a cure for Alzheimer’s cannot be overstated. It is difficult to find anyone whose life has not been affected by this devastating disease. Biotech holds the greatest promise for finding a cure. We must act now for the patients and their families who are counting on us." Greenwood is president and CEO of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.