As the leading care, research and advocacy organization for Alzheimer’s disease, the Alzheimer’s Association applauds Congress for including significant provisions in the final healthcare reform legislation to address the health concerns of a growing Alzheimer population. While the Association did not endorse any specific healthcare reform legislation, the Association did work to ensure that all bills under consideration contained the strongest provisions possible to address the particular challenges and concerns of the more than 5 million Americans with Alzheimer’s…

In today’s media there are reports that the government is planning to shelve plans for a new settlement on care and support for older people. It has been suggested that the government will propose working towards a new settlement on care in the next parliament for fear of a backlash ahead of the election campaign. There is also suggestion of a short-term partial solution for people with the most severe needs. ‘On the day that the US voted through compulsory insurance to cover the costs of healthcare it will be very disappointing if the government bottles it on care…

Westside Medical Associates of Los Angeles and Westside Medical Imaging (WMI) of Beverly Hills announce the benefit of early positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to identify Alzheimer’s in its early more treatable phase. According to Dr…

The University of Pennsylvania and AstraZeneca announced a new collaborative research agreement to make use of their respective talents and resources in an effort to bridge the transition from drug discovery to development. Initially, the collaboration between Penn Medicine and AstraZeneca scientists will focus on generating new Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug candidates for the clinical development pipeline….

More than two thirds of primary care trusts (PCTs) in England are unable to say if or how they spent money allocated to them under the National Dementia Strategy for England. Only 31 per cent (22) of PCTs who responded to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Dementia said they had allocated their proportion of the £150million made available by the government last year. The same percentage could not say how dementia strategy funds had been spent as they were inseparable from other funding…

Sixty per cent of people think politicians are not doing enough to improve care for older people according to a survey by Age Concern and Help the Aged. The poll also found that eight out of ten adults believe care reform is among the most important issues in the forthcoming election. The findings come ahead of a cross party care summit being attended by charity representatives including Alzheimer’s Society’s Acting Chief Executive, Ruth Sutherland…

The field is abuzz with the word “prevention,” but how to pull off this vaunted goal? It’s been held back by a strange Catch-22 of cost, time, and biomarker validation. That might change with a bold initiative led by Eric Reiman, Pierre Tariot, and others at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute. For the past two years, they have been laying the groundwork for what they hope will be an era of collaborative prevention research of shared risks and shared rewards…

WHAT: National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists investigating how prion diseases destroy the brain have observed a new form of the disease in mice that does not cause the sponge-like brain deterioration typically seen in prion diseases. Instead, it resembles a form of human Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, that damages brain arteries…

Model and presenter Nell McAndrew is calling for people to join her in raising money for people with dementia by running for Alzheimer’s Society, Bupa’s nominated charity. Nell’s grandad, Sam, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and she will be running in honour of him. Experienced charity runner Nell, who has notched up several marathons and runs for good causes, says, ‘I was so pleased to hear that Bupa has chosen Alzheimer’s Society as their nominated charity for this year’s Bupa Great North Run…

Greater purpose of life could significantly reduce a person’s chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Researchers in Chicago measured purpose of life of 951 older people who did not have dementia over an average of four years. People who scored in the top 10 per cent on the purpose of life measure were found to be approximately 2.4 times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those in the bottom 10 per cent…