David Hyde Pierce, Advocating for Alzheimer's Awareness

Q: What would help us defeat Alzheimer's? Are there new medicine and treatments coming or do we still need a lot of research? What would help us move forward in the best way?

Pierce: Right now funding for most major disease is in the billions of dollars. Federal funding for research, federal funding for Alzheimer's is in the millions. Alzheimer's at this point--this is a change in the last five years since I first talk to you guys-- has advanced to become the sixth-leading cause of death in the country. So we're in a time where people are not interested in the government spending more money and there's great concern about the deficit, there's great concern about health care and the cost of health care and social security, Medicare and Medicaid. All of those concerns will be effectively wiped out if we don't focus resources, our attention and also finance resources on more research and more access.

We already know great ways to help take care of people to help make their lives easier when they have the disease and to help their family's along but there's an astonishing number of people in this country who have no access to this, who aren't aware. It's such a lonesome disease if you don't know about the resources of the Alzheimer's Association, the support groups and the outreach, and the referral services they have. I'm shocked that working so many years on this that it is still such an isolated disease that so many people aren't aware of what it is and what treatment and services are available. That to me is not a huge expense. We still need billions of dollars for research. We can only fund about 25 percent of the proposals that we get now.

It's unbelievable, we would never in a million years go to fight a war and say, "hey that's great but we're only going to pay for about 25 percent of it, we'll just hope it turns out OK." But in terms of loss of life and devastation to the economy this is a war with a lot of collateral damage and I'm very hopeful that because the disease is so terrible and because it is so widespread and because we already started to make breakthroughs in early diagnosis and better care for people with Alzheimer's, the country as a whole will start to see that there is hope and see that there is potential, that there's a chance to turn Alzheimer's into what polio now is. It was at one time the scourge of this country and now is a disease at least in this country we don't really talk about or think about. That is the potential, that is the hope but as with polio we have to as a nation face it together and do what must be done.

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