USA2 SPOTLIGHT

A September 21, 2019 Yahoo! Finance article highlighted the work of The Youth Movement Against Alzheimer’s (YMAA), who issued a call-to-action for presidential candidates to tackle Alzheimer's disease with a MoveOn.org petition. 70 young people will deliver the signed petitions to congressional leaders and candidates on Capitol Hill on October 24, 2019 during UsAgainstAlzheimer's Advocacy Day. According to YMAA Co-Founder Nihal Satyadev, “We want to tell our presidential candidates and elected leaders that young people care about the Alzheimer's crisis. 1.5 million young people provide Alzheimer's-related care, and 40 percent go into debt doing it. We should not be punished for becoming caregivers, and these numbers are way too high to go unacknowledged.” YMAA is an UsA2 coalition partner.

PATIENT AND CAREGIVER VOICES

A Carlen Maddux blog post featured the advocacy of Dr. David Compton, who has MCI. Compton is working to dispel stigma surrounding dementia, started a support group, and lobbied legislators to create The Tennessee Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias Advisory Council, where he now sits on the Board. The state has the fourth highest annual death rate from Alzheimer's. "The clock is ticking. There needs to be a national sense of utmost urgency. We need to diagnose these diseases much earlier and treat them with the same intensity that we do cancer, diabetes, and heart disease,” said Compton.

BRAIN HEALTH

A September 25, 2019 Forbes article spotlighted Alzheimer’s Genome Project Director Rudolph Tanzi, joined by Susan Collins (ME), who spoke to the Senate Aging Committee about healthy lifestyle changes which can help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, and a host of other conditions. Tanzi believes such changes could delay AD by many years (up to decades) for more than 95 percent of people at genetic risk. According to Tanzi, “The cost of this disease to our country is approaching 300 billion dollars per year. With the American lifespan up to nearly 80 years, this disease is a burgeoning epidemic that could someday single-handedly collapse our healthcare system.”

MUST WATCH

A September 23, 2019 NJ.com article featured filmmaker Maureen Towey’s short film, “The 8th Year of the Emergency,” about a women with Alzheimer’s disease, who stuns her family with an evocative soliloquy on her birthday. The film is based on a memoir by Elinor Fuchs, “Making an Exit,” about being a dementia caregiver. “People have such personal reactions to it. We’ve had a very gratifying reaction from people who see truth in it, and that really was the hope; you make it for families and people who have Alzheimer’s in the hope that it feels true,” said Towey.

EVENTS AND RESOURCES

Join the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation’s Tenth Annual Fall Symposium & Luncheon "Hope on the Horizon.” The event will host a morning symposium with leading Alzheimer's researchers, and a luncheon following to present the Charles Evans Award. November 1, 2019 in New York City.