Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Dementia Continues To Flummox Drugmakers As It Replaces AIDS As One Of World's Top Killers
Bloomberg: Dementia Joins Ranks Of Top Global Killers With No Drug In Sight
Dementia has unseated AIDS as one of the world’s top killers, new figures from the World Health Organization show, as drugmakers struggle to either curb or cure it. Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia killed 1.54 million people in 2015, more than twice the number of deaths from the disease in 2000, according to documents posted on the WHO website last month. It replaced HIV/AIDS as No. 7 on the global health watchdog’s list of the 10 biggest causes of death worldwide. New therapies helped push fatalities from HIV/AIDS from 1.5 million down to 1.1 million over the same 15-year period. (Kresge, 2/15)
California Healthline: An Alzheimer’s ‘Tsunami’ Threatens Latinos
The number of Alzheimer’s cases is growing rapidly across the entire U.S. population, and could nearly triple by 2050 to 13.8 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. But the increase is particularly striking among Latinos, who as a group are at least 50 percent more likely than non-Hispanic whites to develop the disease, according to a report by the University of Southern California’s Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging and the Latinos Against Alzheimer’s network. That’s in part because Latinos live longer, on average, than whites and also because they are more likely to suffer from certain chronic conditions that put them at greater risk for Alzheimer’s, the report says. Compounding the challenge, the report notes, is the fact that the elderly population is growing three times faster among Latinos. (de Marco and Ibarra, 2/16)
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative is likely to continue under the new administration —
Stat: Obama's 'Big Science' Initiatives Will Keep Rolling Under Trump, AAAS Leaders Predict
The big research initiatives launched by President Barack Obama should have enough momentum to keep rolling in the coming years, even if President Donald Trump doesn’t prioritize them, leading advocates for science said Wednesday. Obama, a self-described “science geek,” announced the BRAIN Initiative, which aims to dive down to the cellular level to understand the workings of the human brain, in 2013. The Precision Medicine Initiative came two years later; it seeks to collect detailed health data from at least a million volunteers to fuel research on a variety of diseases. Both projects are housed in the National Institutes of Health. (Simon, 2/15)
