Millions of patients and their caregivers breathed a collective sigh of relief when drugmaker Eli Lilly recently announced its new experimental Alzheimer’s medication appears to slow cognitive decline by 35%. The Food and Drug Administration could approve the new treatment, donanemab, as soon as this year.
It’s an encouraging development, but we’ll need more than a few cutting-edge drugs to reverse the future course of Alzheimer’s disease. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 6 million Americans currently live with Alzheimer’s, and that number is projected to surpass 12.5 million by 2050.
The growing prevalence of Alzheimer’s isn’t just a human tragedy. It’s also an economic issue that will add fuel to the fire in terms of our future debt crises. In the coming decades, the cost of long-term care for millions of additional Alzheimer’s patients would overwhelm government health care spending and dramatically cut productivity among caretakers — unless scientists develop new drugs that cure the debilitating dementia, or at least significantly delay and lessen its onset.
