HBO Tackles Alzheimer's with Powerful Series

HBO's "The Alzheimer's Project", made in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and NIH's National Institute on Aging, can be described as an extended public-service announcement with an inescapable message: This scourge can no longer be ignored.

Reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the tone of the series is a mixture of fear and hope--the later being the result of confidence in the miracles of medicine surely to come.

...the subliminal message here is: Be afraid, be very afraid. If the guesstimate is accurate and some five million people in the U.S. now have Alzheimer's, we may be tempted to consider that this is a tiny number compared to those who will die of cancer or of the four other more-likely causes of death in the U.S. But as the series repeatedly reminds us, it is the baby boomers who are now heading for the age -- typically starting from the late 70s -- when Alzheimer's is most likely to be diagnosed. Not only families, but society as a whole will have to look after these patients, and it will cost a fortune. Nobody says so quite so bluntly, but wouldn't it be better to pay now, to fund more research, so that we don't have to pay for an explosion of sick people later? There is also a very explicit plea here that more patients be signed up for clinical trials. It is the right thing to do.

For more information on Alzheimer's disease, check out LifeTwo's Brain Health category.

Source: WSJ