MUST READS

A February 9, 2015 The Hill article opinion piece by former Rep. Jim Greenwood (R-PA) highlighted the potential of 21st Century Cures and President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative to accelerate cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s. According to Rep. Greenwood (R-PA), "Placing patients at the center of the drug development process will spur the development of therapies for the most prevalent conditions, as well as encourage development of treatments focused on unmet medical needs.  We strongly support establishing a framework for incorporating patient views into the development and regulatory review process in a more structured and transparent way, with respect to benefit-risk assessments and use of patient experience data…Precision medicine holds great promise for many health care interventions to occur much earlier and with increased accuracy. We are pleased that the Precision Medicine Initiative and the Chronic Disease Initiative longitudinal study hold the promise of working very well together. 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."

A February 6, 2015 Wall Street Journal article reported on the amazing plasticity of the human brain. According to the article, "As people reach middle age, exercising the brain and the body to which it is attached—keeping both active—becomes more important. It is one of the few reliable ways to offset the natural wasting process and the damaging influence of our unnaturally sedentary modern lives. It also points to new possibilities for the brain to heal itself in the face of disease and trauma…Consider dementia, which in some form affects some 15% of people in the U.S. over age 70 and advances rapidly as we age. A brain with Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, turns out, by various measures, to be a brain that is losing its overall plasticity. It shrinks and loses connections. But a growing body of research has found that exercise, both mental and physical, can lower the risk of experiencing dementia."

ENTERTAINMENT

A February 9, 2015 The Daily Beast article reported that the film "Still Alice" "has drawn attention to the issue of assisted suicide for Alzheimer’s patients." According to the article, "I think of my mother, who in the early stages of her Alzheimer’s asked a close family friend if he would mind holding open the elevator doors in the building that she was leaving so she could jump down the elevator shaft.  The friend, who might still be in prison if he had complied with my mother’s wishes, still feels guilty about saying “no” to her, but he should, I believe, rest easy. The deeper truth, as Still Alice makes clear, without being proscriptive, is that people like my mother and Alice deserve better legal options and more assistance than they now can get when Alzheimer’s strikes and their primary concern is with ending their lives, not palliative care."

A February 8, 2015 Rolling Stone article reported that Glen Campbell won his sixth Grammy for Best Country Song. According to his wife Kim Campbell, "I'm so proud of him tonight…It's been an amazing journey; he's been so courageous in bringing awareness to Alzheimer's and caregiving. Sadly, he can't be with us tonight because he is in the late stages of Alzheimer's, but he is healthy and cheerful. I know first and foremost he'd want to thank God for a great career and especially for the gift of music. Music, I really believe, kept him healthy for a longer period of time and enabled him to enjoy life while living with a debilitating brain disease. In honoring him, you are shining the light on his quest to make a difference."