In its waning days, a US Congress that can agree on little else has concurred that the nation needs a national plan for fighting Alzheimer’s disease.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the National Alzheimer’s Project Act. The Senate had passed the same bill last week, so it is now clear for signing into law by President Barack Obama.
The bill does not fund Alzheimer’s research, but it may well raise its visibility, by mandating that the government develop, in the full public eye, an “integrated national plan to overcome Alzheimer’s.” The National Alzheimer’s Project, located in the office of the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), will also coordinate Alzheimer’s research and services across all US government agencies, from now until its dissolution in 2025.
The project’s most visible arm will be an Advisory Council that holds quarterly public meetings. Made up of officials from key federal agencies as well as patient advocates, caregivers, physicians, researchers and others, it will advise the DHHS secretary by evaluating the scope of all US funding for Alzheimer’s research, clinical care, and community and home support programmes. It may recommend expanding some, condensing others, and eliminating others. In turn, the secretary will need to formally assess each year the nation’s progress battling the increasingly prevalent disease. She will also need to “evaluate all Federal programs around Alzheimer’s, including budget requests and approvals.”
Some questioned what seems to be an unwritten assumption of the bill– that federal agencies concerned with Alzheimer’s are operating in isolation, unaware of what their counterparts are doing. “There’s this misconception that [agencies like] the National Institutes of Health are completely siloed and never talk to other agencies,” says David Moore, the senior director for governmental relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. “There actually is a lot of conversation going on. Could there be more? Probably. Will this faciltiate that? Yes. And that’s a good thing.”
The Congressional votes were welcomed by the Alzheimer’s Association of America, whose president and CEO, Eric Hall, called the bill’s passage “momentous.” “By setting in motion the first-ever national plan for tackling Alzheimer’s disease, this act offers hope to the as many as 5.1 million Americans currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and their families, and those who face this brain disorder in the future,” he said.
It’s clear there will be many of those, as the Baby Boomers grey. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and co-author Maria Shriver, the wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, make that point in an op-ed article in today’s Washington Post. They note that, beginning on January 1, 2011, US baby boomers will begin turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 people per day for the next 19 years.
Still, the bill does not deliver the big dollars that advocates had sought through other bills that fell by the wayside, like the Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Act, which would have authorized a doubling of the National Institutes of Health’s investment in Alzheimer’s research. At NIH, and at the National Institute on Aging in particular, plunging grant application success rates are taking a toll on research on the devastating disease.