usa2 spotlight

A November 5, 2015 Boston Herald article highlighted a Boston reading of UsA2 co-founder Trish Vradenburg’s Suriving Grace that will feature Marilu Henner, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Loni Anderson, Bob Brustein, Ambassador Swanee Hunt, NPR’s Diane Rehm and Harvard’s Dr. Reisa Sperling. According to Sen. Markey, “Five million people have it right now. By the time all the baby boomers are retired, 15 million people will have it. When you take into account the 15 million caregivers, that’s 30 million people whose principal reality will be Alzheimer’s. If we don’t find a cure, we will never be able to balance the budget, because the amount of money that will have to be spent to deal with it will be astronomical.” Go to survivinggrace.org for tickets and information.

ICYMI: Have you seen UsA2’s PSA that ran on the Colbert Report? Check out this powerful video here. #WeWontWait

A November 5, 2015 CNN.com article by Dr. Sanja Gupta reported on early onset Alzheimer’s and highlighted ActivistAgainstAlzheimer’s member Dr. Sandy Halperin. According to the article, “Thanks to recent advances that allow us to see disease in the living brain, we now know there is evidence of Alzheimer's in neural tissue 20 to 30 years before one first starts noticing lapses in memory. By age 60, when Sandy first started losing words and forgetting his intentions, the disease was already advanced, even if Sandy and his family were noticing symptoms for the first time. ‘There is no pain,’ Sandy told me. I had asked about this because of recent papers showing inflammation in the brain being a primary enemy at the time Alzheimer's disease starts to show itself.”

must reads

A November 6, 2015 RealClearPolitics.com article reported that the Senate may have draft Medicare legislation soon. According to the article, “Jay Khosla, policy director and chief health counsel for the Finance Committee under Hatch, and Elizabeth Jurinka, chief health policy adviser for Wyden on the committee, told an audience near Capitol Hill that a draft bill to improve care and check Medicare spending growth “is the objective” following at least 80 meetings with stakeholders and more than 500 formal comments from interested parties since the spring…In traditional fee-for-service Medicare, supporting “volume” of care when it comes to chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s transforms an aging America into a fiscal time bomb over the long term. Helping such a significant population of ill Americans at lower federal costs and with better wellness outcomes is the puzzle.”

A November 5, 2015 The Los Angeles Times article reported that “the life expectancy of black Americans is catching up to that of whites, thanks to declining mortality rates for some familiar causes of death, new government data show” but black Americans lost ground due to diseases like Alzheimer’s. According to the article, “Blacks lost ground compared to whites in three other areas – maternal conditions like pregnancy and childbirth, Alzheimer’s disease and aortic aneurysms. Combined, these factors increased the gap by about 10 days, according to the report.”

research, science, and technology

A November 5, 2015 Houston Chronicle article reported that The University of Texas Chancellor William McRaven announced a new initiative to fight Alzheimer’s. According to the article, “On the medical end - the UT System also includes six health institutions, including M.D. Anderson and a medical branch in Galveston - McRaven said UT will set its sights on curing Alzheimer's, promising to launch ‘an effort akin to the Manhattan Project to understand, prevent, treat, and cure the diseases of the brain.’”

A November 5, 2015 Gizmodo.com article highlighted a new startup called Human Longevity that offers customers “every possible futuristic medical test, potentially revealing your risk for Alzheimer’s.” According to the article, “Unlike troubled company Theranos, Human Nucleus isn’t promising the tests will actually aid with diagnosis yet. He’s simply offering it as a research service that well-heeled clients can get under the supervision of a doctor. But his hope is that eventually Health Nucleus will amass enough data that researchers will start to see patterns, connecting DNA sequences to diseases, or brain structures with Alzheimer’s.”