Hillary Clinton Proposes to Double the Funds to Fight Alzheimer's Disease

Fighting Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia which affects five million Americans and currently has no cure, is a steadily growing effort in the United States. Democratic White House front-runner Hillary Clinton unveiled a plan to battle Alzheimer's disease. She said that she would more than double federal funding for research and treatment of the disease. Congress recently increased the federal research budget by $350 million, on top of the $586 million that the National Institutes of Health spent this past year.

But Clinton proposed raising that budget to $2 billion per year until 2025.

Clinton said, "We owe it to the millions of families who stay up at night worrying about their loved ones afflicted by this terrible disease and facing the hard reality of the long good-bye to make research investments that will prevent, effectively treat and make a cure possible by 2025."

The Clinton campaign notes that some two-thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women, and that prevalence in elderly African-Americans is twice as high as in elderly whites.

Clinton said, "Investment is vital because the disease is already costing $200 billion per year in the United States and that figure will only grow with the country's aging population."

Rudolph Tanzi, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School and chair of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund Research Consortium, said, "Our main bottleneck in this field has been funding. We are a budget-constrained, not a knowledge-constrained field."

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Source-AFP