Ariz. must sustain research support for Alzheimer's
The Arizona Republic Editorial
:PHOENIX (Sept. 30, 2009) --Arizona is becoming a major player in the global race to prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease. Thanks to relatively small but critical state support, an innovative consortium is making strides in research and offering more options for Arizona patients.
Even in the current budget crisis, the Legislature had the foresight to allocate $2 million to the Arizona Alzheimer's Consortium. It's vital to make sure this investment goes through. The payoff was enormous in the past, and it promises to be even bigger in the future. Researchers are poised to seek federal funding for a potentially groundbreaking study to prevent this devastating disorder.
New numbers - showing the tragic toll of Alzheimer's is increasing even faster than we feared - drive home the urgency of the effort.
According to a report released last week, nearly 36 million people worldwide will be living with the disease or other forms of dementia in 2010, a leap of one-third in just five years.
Alzheimer's is a financial and emotional catastrophe. As patients descend into a terrifying fog, caregivers are exhausted and often clinically depressed. With an aging population, and the disease striking almost half of people older than 85, the burden threatens to become unbearable.
The good news is that there's been more progress in Alzheimer's than any other brain disorder - and a lot of it has been in Arizona. The consortium, cooperating under the umbrella of state funding, pulls together seven biomedical research organizations as its principal partners. It's an all-star line-up: Arizona State University, Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Barrow Neurological Institute, Mayo Clinic Arizona, Sun Health Research Institute, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and University of Arizona.
