Dementia patients need to be engaged citizens

BY JESSE F. BALLENGER Jesse F. Ballenger is a historian of medicine who teaches in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Penn State University. He is the author of "Self, Senility and Alzheimer's Disease in Modern
July 20, 2008
Advocates of federal funding for Alzheimer's and related dementia research have argued since the late 1970s that unless effective treatment or prevention is found, the health care system will be overwhelmed by the coming explosion of victims from the Baby Boom generation. As a model, they frequently have invoked the eradication of polio."In 1935, a March of Dimes was started. In 1961, less than 30 years later, the last polio epidemic occurred," said Robert Butler, founding director of the National Institute on Aging and a leading advocate of Alzheimer's research, in 1983 congressional testimony. " ... Senility could fall the way polio did, if we invest now." In light of the monumental personal losses and social burdens of Alzheimer's, medical research came to seem a moral imperative. The country's hope was fixed on the inevitability of a medical triumph.But it has been 25 years and about $8 billion of federal money for research since Butler testified.
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