White House: By 2025 We Need Alzheimer's Treatment

The Obama administration gave the nation a deadline today: By 2025, we should be able to effectively treat or delay Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the inaugural National Alzheimer’s Plan, a strategy finalized today, a new website was launched that will give families and caregivers information about where to get help. In addition, steps for the government to take over the coming years were laid out as top Alzheimer’s scientists met at the NIH met to discuss what research needs to be given priority in order to meet that ambitious 2025 deadline, the AP reports.

Among the National Alzheimer’s Plan's first steps:

• an $8 million study of an insulin nasal spray that can reach the brain without affecting blood-sugar levels
• an international study, partly funded by the NIH, into whether a treatment targeting the brain plaque amyloid could prevent the disease
• government-offered training for health providers to help care for patients and support their families

The scientists meeting at the NIH will also consider how to improve early diagnosis and whether to begin testing some new therapies earlier, before full-blown symptoms appear, in an effort to postpone the disease’s progress. (More Alzheimer's disease stories.)