Experts: U.S. Falling Behind With Alzheimer's Goals

In 2011, President Obama signed into law The National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA), which outlined a set of initiatives meant to find an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease by 2025. This week, research experts expressed concerns that the project was not proceeding as quickly as it should and proposed a list of fixes meant to strengthen and broaden the project with hopes of meeting original goals, ScienceDaily reports.

NAPA’s strategies include identifying research priorities and milestones, expanding research, identifying early signs of the disease, coordinating global efforts, and translating research findings into the clinical setting. NAPA’s projected goal is improving standards of care and finding effective treatments by 2025.

With the end-date of the project now 11 years away, scientists are feeling the pressure. This week, a group of over forty Alzheimer’s experts published a report in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, which took issues with the existing milestones and suggested revisions to NAPA.

William Klunk, chair of the Alzheimer’s Association Medical and Scientific Advisory council explained, “We do not believe the milestones, as they currently stand, are sufficient to reach the 2025 goal. If the suggested updates are swiftly implemented and funded, we believe prospects for being able to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s by 2025 will increase dramatically.”

According to the report, in order to make the 2025 goal, the plan needs more clinical trials involving larger and more diverse pools of participants, additional research into biomarkers of the disease, and increased coordinative efforts among research groups both domestically and globally. Overall, scientists identified 25 new milestones to augment NAPA’s existing plan.

The proposed expansions, argues Klunk, would bring Alzheimer’s into the same league as cancer and HIV/AIDS in terms of research scale.

Developing Alzheimer’s drugs has been a rocky road for researchers. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) reports that for every one clinical study that yields a new medicine, 34 fail to reach their endpoint. According to Scientific American, of 244 compounds tested between the years 2002-2012, only one was approved.

Because of the extremely high rate of failure, both federal and private funding is low because potential investors are so unlikely to see a return.

Furthermore, PhRMA explained that clinical trials for potential Alzheimer’s treatments face a particular set of challenges. Recruiting and retaining clinical trial participants is problematic when those suffering from the disease are rarely able to provide informed consent. Also, determining a drug’s effectiveness often falls to caregivers who have no shortage of patients to tend to.

The Alzheimer’s Association puts the number of current Alzheimer’s patients in the U.S. at over five million, and that number is expected to exponentially increase as the baby-boomer generation ages and the disease proliferates. Experts warn that failure to meet projected research and development goals would be a fiscal nightmare. Treating the projected number of Alzheimer’s patients in 2050 would cost nearly two trillion dollars.