Must reads

• A July 14, 2014 Reuters article reported that "A large German study is the latest clinical trial to suggest that a cheap generic treatment for diabetes can stave off symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, although conclusive proof from a more formal trial could be about five years away." According to the article, "Researchers in the new trial used routine data from German healthcare plans for the years 2004 until 2010. They tracked a database of about 146,000 patients age 60 and older who initially did not have evidence of dementia. The analysis showed that 13,841 subjects eventually developed dementia, and that for those taking pioglitazone the risk of dementia was significantly reduced with each additional three months the drug was prescribed."
• A July 14, 2014 Washington Post article reported on the efforts of researchers to identify new tools to test for Alzheimer's, including smell and eye tests. According to the article, "In two separate studies on the connection between dementia and sense of smell, teams of researchers found that a decreased ability to detect odors in older people, as determined by a common scratch-and-sniff test, could point to brain cell loss and the onset of dementia.In two other studies, researchers showed that noninvasive eye exams also might offer a way to identify Alzheimer’s in its early stages.The findings — which are to be presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Copenhagen on Sunday — raise hopes that doctors could develop simple, inexpensive diagnostic tools that would hunt down reliable biomarkers of a disease that affects more than 5 million people in the United States."
• A July 12, 2014 Fiscal Times opinion piece by Michael Hodin underscored the need to "incentivize greater investment in innovative therapeutic solutions for non-communicable diseases (NCDs)." According to Hodin, "NCDs like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s are quickly becoming the world’s greatest health and fiscal time bombs, as these diseases increase exponentially as the global population ages…First, it will help re-align our health investment with our health needs. This misalignment is not the US’s failure alone. Globally, NCDs cause nearly two-thirds of all deaths, but only 1.2 percent of all development assistance for health in 2013 was spent on NCDs. That’s less than a billion of the $32 billion in development assistance – places like US AID, its counterpart UK DIFID, the Norwegian Fund, and Gates -spend on health. How could they be so far off the mark? That’s an amazing misallocation of funding. True that solving for NCDs is hard. But it’s also a case of bad policy based on inertia: Until recently, it was the communicable diseases that accounted for most mortality; but with the aging of the global population, partly a consequence of successful communicable disease policy of the 20th century, the need has shifted. And it’s not an easy shift."