At Age 80, Sandra Day O’Connor Notes 50-50 Chance of Getting Alzheimer’s
One out of every two people over the age of 85 has Alzheimer’s, and that’s a worry for Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court to care for her husband as the disease robbed him of his memory.
Speaking at a panel discussion on longevity and Baby Boomers on Saturday, O’Connor said she and her husband had never discussed the possibility of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Stanford University News reports. Now she is all too aware that she has a significant chance of contracting the disease simply because of her age.
“I turned 80, I don’t even like to say the word,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor’s husband died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease last year. Now the retired justice is calling for a broad scale effort to find a medical solution in a New York Times op-ed she co-authored. Her goal: Stop Alzheimer’s by 2020.
“Our government is ignoring what is likely to become the single greatest threat to the health of Americans: Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is 100 percent incurable and 100 percent fatal,” O’Connor writes with Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner and gerontologist Ken Dychtwald. “It attacks rich and poor, white-collar and blue, and women and men, without regard to party. A degenerative disease, it steadily robs its victims of memory, judgment and dignity, leaves them unable to care for themselves and destroys their brain and their identity—often depleting their caregivers and families both emotionally and financially.”
The editorial cites financial statistics:
• For each penny spent on Alzheimer’s research, the nation spends $3.50 on caring for persons with Alzheimer’s.
• The National Institutes of Health spend about $3 billion a year on AIDS research, while Alzheimer’s, with five times as many victims, gets only $469 million.
Hat tip to Above the Law.
