And she still hasn't developed Alzheimer's dementia." "But she developed mild cognitive impairment about three decades after the average age in her family. "Nobody's at higher risk for Alzheimer's than she would have been," says Reiman, a neuroscientist at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix, who has spent the last three decades studying the loosely related, 6,000-person family cohort she belongs to in Colombia. What made the woman so special was that-despite those plaques-she seemed almost normal for her age. She had the highest levels they'd ever recorded. What made the Colombian woman special was not just what doctors discovered when they first scanned her brain to measure the buildup of amyloid-beta, the sticky plaques long suspected of playing a key role in the devastating cognitive decline seen in advanced Alzheimer's disease. And it is raising hopes that we are finally getting closer to cracking Alzheimer's disease. Although the field seems unlikely to meet the 2025 deadline, what researchers have learned in the past few years has given them a far more detailed and nuanced understanding of the disease. Scientists are racing to diffuse a ticking demographic time bomb. By the year 2050, the number of Americans with the disease will double to 14 million, with a projected cost in treatment and care that, by some estimates, will top $2 trillion-10 percent of the present U.S. That ambition reflects a growing urgency on the part of an aging public, their doctors and public health officials. It's also fed by money: the National Institutes of Health is expected to spend $2.8 billion on Alzheimer's research in 2020-a six-fold increase since 2011, when Congress passed legislation directing the NIH to come up with an aggressive and coordinated plan to accelerate research with the ambitious goal of coming up with a way to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer's by 2025. This hope is fed by an explosion in technological innovations in gene sequencing, data analysis and molecular biology, which are allowing scientists to study the progression of the disease earlier and in far more detail than previously possible.
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