Playing catch-up with Alzheimer's

Chicago Tribune

By Cory Franklin
May 27, 2009
When Pete Townshend of The Who wrote "My Generation," the 1965 Baby Boomer anthem containing the memorable lyric "I hope I die before I get old," he'd probably never heard of Alois Alzheimer, the German physician who described Alzheimer's disease in 1906. Yet today, their worlds have converged.

Alzheimer's is rising in epidemic proportions in the parents of Baby Boomers, and threatens Boomers themselves. Today, more than 5 million people have Alzheimer's, now the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths increased by 33 percent between 2000 and 2004, while mortality from breast cancer, heart disease and strokes all decreased. The number of people with Alzheimer's rose by 10 percent in the last decade and included more than 5 percentof individuals over the age of 65 and 40 percent of those over 85By 2050, the number of cases is expected to triple to more than 16 million.

That figure includes only the official counts, cases diagnosed in hospitals and medical clinics. There are an unreported number of housebound patients who are by themselves every day because their families can't afford sitters. Alzheimer's accounts for nearly $150 billion of health-care costs annually. Medicare spending alone is expected to triple to $189 billion by 2015, from $62 billion in 2000. In addition to workers hired to care for Alzheimer's patients, there are an estimated 10 million unpaid caregivers, primarily families and friends. The emotional toll on these caregivers is incalculable; they suffer extremely high levels of stress and depression.

Despite all this, the epidemic took the medical community, biomedical industry and government by surprise. When The Who's "My Generation" was released, Alzheimer's was barely mentioned in most medical textbooks. A generation later, most physicians still knew little about Alzheimer's. Lacking answers and unable to help patients......read the whole story

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