Maybe if millions found out a decade earlier, we’d greatly increase government funding to treat the disease. A few million more advocates for research.
Seems like we currently spend about $4 billion a year.
Why is Halloween candy a good metric for this? Seems like in general you could justify any type of spending to compare it to something considered entertainment or leisure. Maybe we should compare it to total NBA league revenue at $10B?[0] Or to entertainment as a whole?
Just an arbitrary metric. We should probably consider the cost to society then base the funding on that. For example, Americans spent $200 billion in care in 2010, and this will increase to $500 billion in 2040. Perhaps as much as $1 trillion by 2050. What do you think is appropriate to invest to “cure the disease“?
It would be easy to demonstrate. Obviously, and clearly no one wants to waste money.
By the way, 100% of the time I make my observation, someone makes a similar comment as yours. Considering I’ve been making my observation for decades, I’m beginning to wonder why it’s not obvious to everyone.
I guess I'd observe that very few humans in history have believed money can cure any disease.
This is why rich folks like Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates, Genghis Khan or whomever don't traditionally invest 90% of their net worth in curing senescence, even though they all suffer from it and would get huge personal benefit if it could be cured.
It would certainly be a wonderful thing if Alzheimer's could be cured but I can't imagine how you could demonstrate this other than calling for optimism.
It's an interesting point you bring up about senescence in general. I think there is an idea today that you shouldn't expect to live forever. Taking this view, it could add another factor to the problem of how to spend a health budget. For example, an argument could be made under this view that preventing cancer in children would be more important than curing Alzheimer's, even if it is less common.
Lastly, the claim that "we only spend x amount on y disease" is flawed. Alzheimer's is an extremely complex disease because it has to do with the degeneration of the neurons in our brain. Our understanding of the brain is still limited, which means we likely need to understand the brain more in general in order to understand Alzheimer's disease, which is a special case of brain function in general. That being the case, I think a lot neurological research is helping Alzheimer's in some way, even if it is not labeled as such. To give the most extreme and obvious example, the discovery of neurons itself can be considered research of Alzheimer's, even though the researchers had no such intention. Taking this view further, we can consider research in ancillary fields like gene sequencing to be aiding in Alzheimer's research. It may be something that comes down to fully or almost fully mapping out the brain and the functions of all its relevant genes in order to solve the problem. I doubt such as massive undertaking would labeled as "Alzheimer's research."
It's probably not great as a mass screening technique, at least as described - it has a roughly 90% positive predictive value in a population already screened by experiencing cognitive decline. (In other words, when the population prevalence is expected to be higher). But it sounds way better than having a cerebrospinal fluid sample taken!
The actual article, for those interested, is here:
What do you think a more appropriate funding level should be?
Not to say that we shouldn't fund more, but Alzheimer's (as a single disease) receives some of the highest funding levels from the NIH. Looking at https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending#/ (categories are non-exclusive btw), Alzheimer's is 'outranked' by like... cancer (all of cancer at 8 billion 2024 vs 3.8), all of infectious diseases (8 billion again), and all of 'rare diseases' (6.8 billion). All of women's health, and mental health also get ~4.5 billion of funding.
Cancer is worse by deathrate. I would say alzheimer is much worse in terms of human suffering. Cancer doesn't slowly hollow your soul out but Alzheimer does. That to me makes Alzheimer much worse.
Many cancers are extremely painful and life altering, like many types of throat and mouth cancers. We should just agree that both diseases are extremely harmful and thus both should be well funded.
Skimming the article I don't see this information: what's the false positive rate?
The article says that the blood test (if positive) is followed up with a scan to confirm the diagnosis, but if there were to be a lot of false positives that wouldn't be so simple.
EDIT: okay, reading the original paper, appears the false positive and false negative rates are pretty much equal.
Seems like we currently spend about $4 billion a year.
https://www.alz.org/news/2024/congress-bipartisan-funding-al....
Americans spend about as much on Halloween candy:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1305961/halloween-candy-....