Texas Just Committed to Billions for Dementia Research

How much of an impact does dementia have on the world’s population? According to a report released this year by the nonprofit Alzheimer’s Association, 7.2 million older Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease. That’s a vast number on its own; when you factor in the global effects of Alzheimer’s disease, and the fact that Alzheimer’s is not the only cause of dementia, you get an even more unsettling sense of the world.

One of the nation’s most populous states recently took a significant step towards addressing dementia. The state in question is Texas, where voters just approved a ballot measure that commits $3 billion of surplus funds towards dementia research over the next decade.

This new venture is known as the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. As Jennie Erin Smith reports at Science, it takes cues from a similar initiative that was established more than a decade ago, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Science reports that two-thirds of voters who cast their ballots earlier this month supported the measure; previously, its creation also had bipartisan support in the state government.

“CPRIT allowed Texas to make a number of very significant discoveries in the cancer space,” Sudha Seshadri, founding director of the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, told Science. “I think this is going to be transformational.”

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The timing of this measure is especially welcome. Earlier this year, the journal Nature Medicine published a study that indicated that the number of adults developing dementia annually in the U.S. was likely to virtually double between 2020 and 2060.

“Our study results forecast a dramatic rise in the burden from dementia in the United States over the coming decades, with one in two Americans expected to experience cognitive difficulties after age 55,” said one of the study’s authors, Josef Coresh, MD, said in a statement. With that on the horizon, it’s going to take a considerable effort to reckon with that expansion — and that’s going to require a lot of funding.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…