Must reads

• A January 29, 2014 Roll Call opinion piece by Ellis Rubinstein and George Vradenburg called for a more efficient Alzheimer's drug development process. According to the authors, "Alzheimer’s drug development is often inefficient and riddled with bottlenecks. A single phase III study can require years to enroll participants, let alone return a verdict on the therapy. What’s more, researchers and companies don’t have consistent yardsticks for determining what makes a promising drug in the first place....If companies, governments and academic researchers make these changes, we can get back on track to developing a drug that can slow or reverse Alzheimer’s by 2025 — and offer tremendous benefits for patients and health systems. We could avert 7 million case-years of dementia and save upward of $100 billion in health care expenditures over a 15-year period, according to the Alzheimer’s Disease Summit report."
• A January 29, 2014 Huffington Post piece by Nicco Mele declared that it's time to "bring the fight to dementia." According to Mele, "Cancer is ugly, but today, thanks to decades of well-funded research, a diagnosis is not a death sentence. Through innovative advances in health research overall, many of us can now expect to live into our 80s, 90s and even pass 100 years of age. However, with such advanced age comes a heavy price -- the odds of developing dementia increase nearly 50 percent! No person ever wants to die "that way", bedridden and withering away from the person you once were, and away from the people who love you. We want to give people a fighting chance to take on dementia head-on and win. To do that will require a significant increase in funding for basic research on the impact of aging on the brain." Nicco Mele is on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School and a leading expert in the integration of social media and technology with culture, politics and policy.
• A January 29, 2014 New York Times article reported that "the Justice Department will pay for voluntary-use GPS tracking devices for children with autism or other conditions that put them at risk for fleeing their caregivers." According to the article, "Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said on Wednesday that the federal government already provided grant money for devices to track seniors with Alzheimer’s and that the department would now allow for the grant funds’ beneficiaries to include children with autism spectrum disorder." [Full article attached]