National Alzheimer's Plan a call for action – before it's too late
Imagine a time when Alzheimer’s is diagnosed in the very earliest stages, a treatment is prescribed – and it works.
Imagine a time when your doctor recommends ways to prevent Alzheimer’s – and it helps. Imagine a time when every other senior citizen you see or hear about is not suffering from this ugly disease that steals our parents and makes them our children.
This is what the National Alzheimer’s Plan, released in draft form earlier this month by the Department of Health and Human Services, proposes to do: Give us a future without fear of the future.
By 2025, we could have effective treatment and definitive prevention information that could have a resounding impact on the world. This is the goal of the draft plan, which an advisory council of medical and governmental officials met to discuss last week in Washington. The next meeting of the Advisory Council is April 17. A copy of the plan and feedback form is available online.
Early treatment is a fine concept but will only work if people step up to be tested – and volunteer to participate in research projects. But how many times have you heard young and middle-aged people say, “If I’m going to get it, I don’t want to know.”
Dr. Jon LaPook, medical correspondent for CBS News, has been reporting on the disease for years. To those fearful of being tested now, he says this: "The thinking is that right now we may have effective drugs, but we're giving them too late. It turns out that the changes in the brain actually start 10-20 years before the symptoms. So we have to identify the symptoms early and give the drugs then. It's like heart disease: If you wait for somebody to have five heart attacks, and he's in heart failure, and then you say, 'Why don't we give Lipitor?,' it's too late. The same thing may be true for drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer's."
My 89-year-old mother recently visited her sister, Rosie, before leaving for California to spend the winter with my sister. The two cried and hugged when they saw each other, as they always do. Then they laughed about the old days and bragged about how they never fought as children, as they always do.
A few days later, Mom was crying that she hadn't seen Rosie in “such a long time.” When I showed her a photo of the two of them at that visit, Mom insisted the woman standing next to her, interlocking arms and looking exactly like her, was not Aunt Rosie.
“Who is it, Mom?” I asked.
“I don’t know, some old aunt. But it’s not Rosie. She’s much younger.”
“How old?”
She looked up, thinking. “About 14.”
The government spent about $500 million in 2011 on research for Alzheimer's and related dementias. The check it wrote for cancer research was $6 billion, and that doesn’t count the additional funding that went to research for breast, brain and lung cancers.
It’s not surprising, then, that the sixth leading cause of death in the country is the only major disease with the number of fatalities that continue to go up, not down.
Another major goal of the plan is to improve the quality and efficiency of care. This means that the debate over funding will necessarily cover the cost of training a high-quality caregiver workforce and ultimately who pays for that care.
Care should be tailored to the stages of the disease and cover “they myriad care settings in which care is delivered, such as in the home, physician’s office and long-term care facility,” the plan advocates. And what about co-occurring chronic conditions? How should my mom’s care be modified to accommodate her diabetes and congestive heart failure?
Good questions, all. I’m hopeful now that the volume of the conversation about this most bizarre disease is finally being turned up. And I’m hopeful that the discussion will just get louder and louder.
With the numbers being what they are, how can it not?
Anne Marie Gattari is owner of BrightStar of Grosse Pointe / Macomb. Contact her via email.
