What will have a bigger impact upon Medicare & Medicaid than Cancer and Heart Disease? The cost of treating Alzheimer’s disease. According to the Alzheimer’s Association by 2050, Medicare & Medicaid spending on people with Alzheimer’s will increase by 278% from today’s spending levels*. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding Alzheimer’s. These scientists, with Life Science Project Managers by their side, are developing and testing new treatments, including recently approved and others in late-stage clinical trials. None of these treatments are indicated to cure Alzheimer’s but rather help to manage symptoms and slow progress of the disease for people in the early or middle stages.
Before looking at examples of how Project Managers have become even more involved in Alzheimer’s care, the following is a brief background on Alzheimer’s disease. As per The Economist, “About 115 years ago, Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist, conducted the autopsy of a patient named, Auguste Deter that helped him identify the disease now known as Alzheimer’s. He noticed three unusual features of her brain. It was at least a third smaller than normal. Many neurons, the nerve cells, had vanished. He also saw abnormal deposits inside the remaining cells, especially in the cerebral cortex, the thin outer layer of grey matter. Between a third and a quarter had been invaded by dense knotty bundles, now known as “neurofibrillary tangles”, caused by a build-up of a protein called tau. And across the cortex were deposits of another protein, since identified as beta-amyloid, which collect between neurons and disrupt their functioning”.
Caring for someone with Alzheimer’s requires more than medicines. It involves human beings skilled with deep empathy and endurance leveraging new resources to help redefine care. Consequently, managing cross functional teams on the development of these new care resources is an area for Project Managers to contribute even more. The following are just a few examples of these new care resources.
- A Place to Remember from PMI (Highlight of partnerships till Life Sciences bring us a cure)
- “Reminiscence therapy”, in which people are helped to remember events, people and places through sight, touch, taste, smell or sound can have remarkable results. Music seems especially potent. After caring for her mother and writing her book on dementia, Sally Magnusson founded a charity called “Playlist for Life”, devoted to producing musical life-soundtracks for people. So dementia care need not be grim.
- Camilla Cavendish’s recent book (“Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing World”), where she writes: “Care work is undervalued, underpaid, emotionally draining and physically exhausting. Yet it is, in my view, highly skilled. It requires enormous maturity and resilience; deep wells of kindness, too.”
- Adelina Comas-Herrera, a researcher at the London School of Economics, is leading a study into care in poorer countries (“Strengthening Responses to Dementia in Developing Countries” or STRIDE). She argues that what is needed, given the looming labor crunch, is a new model of collaborative care. This might involve using what institutional infrastructure exists for new purposes, especially in poor countries with few arrangements in place.
Finally, to further complicate the already complex and costly Alzheimer’s treatment space, Covid-19 has accelerated the known challenges of care for Alzheimer’s patients across the world as well as creating new ones in the areas of research, outcomes and long-term care facilities.
*Costs of Alzheimer's to Medicare and Medicaid
