In the Los Angeles Times, projections that Alzheimer’s disease will ravage the economy.

By 2010, Alzheimer’s care will cost Medicare about $160 billion a year. By 2035, it could overtake the defense budget. One analysis has estimated that by 2050, Alzheimer’s will cost Medicare more than $1 trillion annually. Those numbers do not include privately insured and uninsured costs.

“From a social and economic view, it is about the money, the growing diversion of resources to sustain life in those increasingly unaware of their own lives,” Harry Tracy wrote recently in NeuroInvestment, his industry newsletter. “There is no greater public health issue looming in the developed world.”

While the cost of Alzheimer’s soars, federal money spent on research has flattened and is expected to decline in real terms in the future as the competition for federal money heightens. The rising costs of treating the disease coupled with reduced research funding is, to some, a foreboding combination.

Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel Corp., spoke at this year’s Society for Neuroscience convention in San Diego. Grove, who has Parkinson’s disease, lamented the lack of a full-scale attack on neurodegenerative disorders: “We are about to experience an explosion of Alzheimer’s disease cases. . . . This situation is best compared to astronomers following a meteor hurdling toward San Diego, aimed to hit a very precisely calculated place and time. What would we do if we had such a situation? I think we would take it a little more seriously than we take the economic meteor that’s coming just as predictably our way.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:14 am and is filed under alzheimer's, caregivers, elderly, families. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post