Time for Washington to refocus on Alzheimer’s research

Alzheimer’s disease is a thief. It robs a person of their memories, their identity, their independence and ultimately their life. It steals away loved ones from countless family members every year.

As one of the leading causes of death in our nation, Washington needs to wake up, consider Alzheimer’s a serious public health crisis, and move our researchers, our health care providers, our caregivers, patients and families closer to a cure.

{mosads}We are at a pivotal moment in Alzheimer’s research. We have the ideas, the technology, and the will power that could one day make this terrible disease a preventable one. Though ambitious plans like the Path to 2025 and the Alzheimer’s Accountability Act are now underway, we still have hurdles in Washington to overcome on our way to a cure.

What has impeded – and continues to impede – our ability to carry out a focused and aggressive strategy like the National Alzheimer’s Plan is the staggering underinvestment in important research that hamstrings agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The result of this underinvestment is clear. The total cost of Alzheimer’s in 2015 will hit the ceiling at $226 billion, which includes a $153 billion drain on Medicare and Medicaid. You read that right: about one out of every five taxpayer dollars that were spent on Medicare went to treating Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.

What’s even more maddening is that one-quarter of one-percent of that sum was committed to research, which is the only path toward actually reducing this $226 billion cost – an amount which is expected to continue to increase with every year. Should we continue to respond to Alzheimer’s as we do today, this disease will cost us an estimated $1.1 trillion by 2050 in today’s dollars.

It’s easy for a member of Congress to ask for more funding for a program and call it a night, declaring mission accomplished. We’re not doing that here. No one is advocating for a shortsighted strategy of throwing money at a problem and hoping for the best. We need budgets that cut where we can but – most importantly – invest where we must. An enhanced but targeted investment in Alzheimer’s is firmly in this must territory. This trend of chronic underinvestment in one of our nation’s most needy areas must be reversed. In fact, the U.S. could save $220 billion within the first five years of a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease being introduced, according to the Alzheimer’s Association report, Changing the Trajectory of Alzheimer’s Disease: How a Treatment by 2025 Saves Lives and Dollars.

In addition to its profound implications for government budgets, the Alzheimer’s epidemic has inflicted a devastating toll on American families. This disease is a nightmarish reality for over 5 million Americans – nearly two-thirds of which are women. Alzheimer’s very nature also ensures its impact spreads far beyond just those living with the disease. In 2013, for instance, over 15.5 million family and friends provided 17.7 billion hours of unpaid care valued at $220.2 billion.

Alzheimer’s advocates were also given another victory at the end of the 113^th Congress. As a lead Democratic author of the Alzheimer’s Accountability Act, I worked on a bipartisan effort to ensure that it was included in the omnibus spending bill that became law in December 2014. This legislation requires scientists from NIH to create an annual Alzheimer’s research budget for each fiscal year through 2025, something that would free research funding from the politics of bureaucratic budget procedures. These scientists would include in each budget what they would need to reach the National Alzheimer’s Plan’s 2025 goal: to effectively prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease over the next decade.

While these recent efforts by Congress represent a notable first step, we must strive to do even more to ensure this trend of chronic underinvestment in Alzheimer’s research is reversed. The federal government in the past has made significant commitments to combat deadly diseases including heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and breast cancer – with deaths from and dollars spent on each of these diseases declining as a result. We must now commit to smartly investing in Alzheimer’s research in much the same way if we have any hope of turning the tragedies caused by this disease into a thing of the past.

With such tightly constrained budgets and so many competing interests for federal dollars in recent years, funding can be difficult to find. However, the economic effects of this underinvestment alone, without even considering the unbearable human tolls, should prompt swift action.

Only then will we stop this thief and be able to overcome new challenges in health care.

Tonko has represented New York’s 20th Congressional District since 2009. He sits on the Energy and Commerce and the Science, Space and Technology committees. Tonko was the lead Democratic cosponsor of the Alzheimer’s Accountability Act, which became law in 2014.