The Age 65+ Silent Killer

How this surprise accident claims 32,000 lives every year

Watch the video of today's podcast here: https://www.thetayf.com/pages/multimedia?wchannelid=c4ogwxwvtw&wmediaid=mk9780hakp

Ric Edelman: It's Friday, January 5th. Coming up on today's show, it's the surprising thing that just might kill you in retirement. I'm going to tell you what it is and how you can prevent it from happening. Plus, we're going to talk with George Vradenburg on a different subject us against Alzheimer's.

Yesterday, I told you that you're likely to live to age 100 or beyond if you missed the show. The links in the show notes. But there's one thing you need to do to help you make sure that you get to age 100 and beyond. You need to avoid falling down. It's the leading cause of death by injury for people over 65. Falling down kills 32,000 people a year. 3 million visits to the emergency room. Broken bones, head injuries, 300,000 people hospitalized every year just for hip fractures, $50 billion in medical costs. Every second of every day, somebody 65 plus falls down. Oops, there goes another one. More than 95% of hip fractures are caused by falling, usually by falling sideways. Women fall more often than men. They suffer 75% of all hip fractures. Here's the thing - falling is not a normal part of aging. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Council on Aging publish a quiz to see if you're at higher risk for falling.

Let's take the quiz right now. Let's see how you do. Oh, you're in your 30s. You're active, physically fit. You're not going to fall down. Even if you do, you'll be fine. Fine. Then take this quiz with your parents in mind or your grandparents in mind. All right, here we go.

First, have you fallen in the last year? If yes, give yourself two points because people who have fallen once are likely to fall again. Next, have you been advised to use a cane or a walker? If yes, give yourself two points because people who have been advised to use a cane or walker are more likely to fall. Do you sometimes feel unsteady when you're walking? If yes, give yourself one point. When you're at home walking around the house, do you steady yourself by holding on to furniture? If yes, give yourself one point.

When you're in a chair and you're standing up, do you need to push with your hands to help you get up? If yes, give yourself one point because that means you have weak leg muscles. That's a major reason for falling. Do you have trouble stepping up onto a curb? If yes, give yourself one point. That's also a sign of weak leg muscles. Do you often have to rush to the toilet? If yes, give yourself one point. Rushing to the bathroom, especially at night, increases your chances of falling. Have you lost some of the feeling in your feet? If yes, give yourself one point. Numbness in your feet can cause you to stumble and fall.

Do you take medicine that sometimes make you feel lightheaded or more tired than usual? If yes, give yourself one point. Do you take medicine to help you sleep or improve your mood? If yes, give yourself another point those medicines can increase your chance of falling. Do you often feel sad or depressed? If yes, one point. Depression is linked to falls.

Now add it all up. How many points did you score? If you scored four points or more, you are at risk of falling. You need to go talk to your doctor or to your parents or grandparents. If you were taking this quiz for them, tell your doctor right away if you have fallen or if you're afraid you might fall, or if you feel unsteady. Get an eye exam as well and update your glasses. Get your feet checked out. Make sure you're wearing proper footwear and stay active. Exercise your legs to make them stronger and improve your balance. Tai Chi is great for that and make sure your home is safe.

Get rid of hazards that could cause you to trip. Replace rugs with wood floors or carpets. Get rid of slippery surfaces. Keep clutter off the floors, add grab bars in the bathroom, get handrails and lights installed on all your staircases. 

And always when you're climbing up or down stairs, use the two-point stance. Always have two points connected. That means one foot and one arm, because one of your feet are always up in the air. And that means using the handrails.

Yeah, you can live to age 100 if you avoid falling down.

Be sure to join me all next week. I'm going to be podcasting for you from CES in Las Vegas. Yeah, it's the annual Consumer Electronics Show. I'll be there all week looking at the newest tech that's coming in our future, some of it this year. I'm going to tell you all about it. It's the biggest event of its kind, CES. More than half of the Fortune Global 500 is going to be there. Top retailers from 150 countries, 44 different technology categories from 5G to AI to crypto, fintech, food tech, gaming and esports, home entertainment, home office, hardware investing tech, quantum computing, robotics, space tech, sports tech, vehicle tech, video tech, wellness tech. It's all next week starts on Monday. Be sure to listen.

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Exclusive Interview: George Vradenburg

Meet the man leading the fight to fund Alzheimer’s research globally

Ric Edelman: You're listening to The Truth About Your Future. And yeah, this is a show about your future. And typically, as you know, if you've been listening to me over the years, you know, I'm really bullish about the future. I'm as optimistic as it gets. I think that our future is going to be incredibly bright and exciting, and I just can't wait to see what comes about in the year 2100. Which, by the way, I fully expect to be here for that. And yet we have to make sure we're not being Pollyanna about this, that we're not truly looking through life with rose colored glasses. How many other cliches can they give you? We really do need to look at some of the realities of what's happening. Is the future going to truly be as bright as we hope it will be? There is one topic in particular that gives me a great deal of pause, and in which I've been working with others in trying to deal with it, and there's no greater expert in this subject than my good friend George Vradenburg. So I'm very happy to bring George on to the podcast. George, how are you? 

George Vradenburg: I'm fine. Thank you, Ric, and thank you for focusing on this issue and in your off-air life, as well as your on-air life. 

Ric Edelman: So we might as well let everybody know what we're talking about. In a word, it's Alzheimer's or more appropriately, Alzheimer's disease. George, I'm going to let you set the stage. Why is it I am suggesting that Alzheimer's may be the dark in our silver cloud? 

George Vradenburg: Well, given the fact that we're now living longer lives and that one out of three of us over 85 will have this disease, it's in all of our futures. Unless we happen to die of something else before 85. So 85 is certainly a reachable age for most people. So this is a disease that not only is of concern to them, but to people of virtually all ages as they experience this through grandparents, through parents, through friends. So we find that this is the most feared disease in America, even during Covid, when you ask people what is your most feared disease? They said Alzheimer's before they would say Covid. So this is something that affects us all. We all tend to know someone, either in our family or in the family of a friend who's experienced it. It's just ubiquitous. 

Ric Edelman: And it is partly frightening, not merely because we all are horrified at the thought of losing our minds literally and losing our memories and losing control over our bodies and our surroundings. That itself is terrifying, but we're also equally terrified at the fact, as you pointed out, George, so many of us have experienced a family member or loved one or a friend who has developed those symptoms, and we have seen the devastation of the family, the caregiver, because these Alzheimer's patients require typically 24 seven care, the emotional toll, the physical toll, the financial toll on the family is, in its own way, as devastating as what the patient themselves are experiencing. 

George Vradenburg: It is. There are 2 to 3 caregivers for every person with this disease. It's usually the daughter or daughter-in-law or the wife, because women tend to live longer. And as a consequence, we men get the benefit of that. But on the other hand, our wives, our sisters, our daughters take on the burden of this. So you're absolutely right. It is an enormous emotional impact on a family to see a loved one slowly disappear in front of you over a period of time. And of course, the cost is significant. The caregiving costs at home are significant, and if you want to put your loved one in an assisted living facility because your loved one is either gotten agitation or incontinence, or just made caregiving at home impossible, the cost of assisted living well over $120,000 a year. This is an expensive disease for families, and think, how many families in America can't afford $500 for an unexpected medical emergency? So essentially, it will require many people in this country who cannot afford that professional care to lose their jobs, to get off of their jobs, or to take part time jobs instead of full-time jobs to step out of a career. And that has impacts on that person's career and income generating possibilities currently, as well as for their retirement. And it cost them their opportunity to live their best life. 

Ric Edelman: And just to put an exclamation point on this, that $120,000 figure that George has cited is not covered by health insurance or Medicare. That's out-of-pocket cost ten grand a month is the national average for Alzheimer's patients, and it doesn't take long for a family to find itself bankrupted as a result of this, at which point they become eligible, the patient, for Medicaid, which is a federal health program for the poor. But by that point, the family is bankrupted. And this is why it is so financially devastating and why this is going to have the risk of threatening the nation's finances if we have. You tell me, George, how many people in America have Alzheimer's today? 

George Vradenburg: Well, it depends a little on how you define it right now. Symptomatic Alzheimer's, It's about 6.5 million people. 

Ric Edelman: And how many are we projecting by 2050? 

George Vradenburg: Triple that. It's 15 million or so. This is a disease which in a symptomatic phase is represented by that 6 to 6.5 million today, tripling over the next 30 years. But we can now identify this disease 20 years before you get symptoms. So if you look at the population that has Alzheimer's, but not yet gotten symptoms of Alzheimer's, is closer to 45 to 50 million today in the United States. 

Ric Edelman: And this is why it's such a challenge for our government, because if everybody's going to go broke, paying for care for themselves and their families, turning to Medicaid, which is a government-funded program, the system is simply not designed to deal with this and why it is terrifying on every level the patient, the family and society and why George has been devoting his professional life to this issue. George, you're not only the founder and chairman of US Against Alzheimer's, which we'll talk about in a bit, but more recently, you have become the founding chairman of the Davos Alzheimer's Collective. Talk about what you're trying to accomplish with that organization. 

George Vradenburg: Well, this is a partnership of one of our organizations, the biopharmaceutical industry, which is set up with us, a sort of corporate round table around this disease. And the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum called us a couple of years ago and said, we now think that Alzheimer's globally is a challenge, a global health challenge comparable to infectious diseases. And therefore we want to take this issue on globally, most of the people, two-thirds to three-quarters of the people with Alzheimer's in the world do not live in Europe or the United States or Japan. They live in low- and middle-income countries. Think China, you know, think India, think Indonesia, think Brazil, think Nigeria, Nigeria, the population generally younger. But the threat of Alzheimer's already is on their radar screen. So these large countries with very large populations are now the bulk of the people with Alzheimer's.

So low- and middle-income countries are suffering this as well. 90% of the research on Alzheimer's has been done in white Caucasian populations, that is, populations of Euro Eurasian descent. Yet 65 to 70% of the population with Alzheimer's is not of European descent. So how do you attack this global issue? You have to link and scale existing efforts that exist around the world that are under scaled. As one of the directors of board of directors of the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative. Elias Zerhouni, who is the chairman of the director of NIH years ago, said, we're trying to attack 100-foot problem with ten-foot ladders. You cannot do that. You will never get to a solution to the problem. We need to link those ladders, scale them to be able to achieve a solution to this tremendously impactful global health issue at a global level. 

Ric Edelman: So can you talk about what the Alzheimer's Collaborative via Davos, the World Economic Forum, is trying to do that is not already being done?

George Vradenburg: Well, first we do basically have three programs. One is a cohort program. So there are cohorts around the world that have been developed that is hundreds of thousands of people. In a study of cardiovascular disease, of malaria, of HIV, AIDS, of metabolic disease, diabetes, we are basically investing in those cohorts to get measures that are relevant to Alzheimer's disease. So we're investing in blood, which gives you genetic information and gives you biomarkers of what we know about this disease. And we invest in digital cognitive assessments. That is the ability to use a cell phone to basically test your memory through time. So every quarter speak the same thing into a cell phone. We can now tell by voiceprint whether or not you're cognitively declining. That's one program. That data will be aggregated in a Gates Foundation data sharing mechanism, so that every researcher around the world will have the same access to resource and data that the high-income countries now do, but the low incomes do not. I don't think intellectual capacity is distributed 90/10 in white Caucasians either. So that's one.

Number two is global clinical trials. We do clinical trials in North America. We have 100 trial site operation. But we've now got 40 trial sites in Europe. We are now looking at trial sites in Africa, Latin America and Asia to extend clinical trials into these larger countries, which are going to become commercial marketplaces for biopharmaceutical products.

And then third, we have to get our health systems ready. Our health systems do not know how to detect and diagnose brain disease or cognitive impairment or dementia at all. And so we are working now in 20 different countries to basically introduce the low-cost ability to detect and diagnose this disease early in the course of the disease before symptoms, so that we can deliver a medicines that will slow the disease into those pre-symptomatic populations and prevent symptoms from occurring. 

Ric Edelman: Now it sounds very exciting and just listening to it, I'm thankful that all of this is going on. But at the same time, I'm wondering, Alzheimer's has been around forever, like cancer has been and tuberculosis has been. And yet when we look at TB, when we look at cancer, we have seen incredible amounts of money and incredible amounts of progress in the fighting of those diseases. Give me a sense of where we've been in the world of Alzheimer's. Go back over the last 20 or 30 years. How much money has been spent in research and what do we have to show for it? 

George Vradenburg: Well, you're absolutely right. This disease was identified by a Doctor Alzheimer in 1906. And he identified two distinctive elements of this disease amyloid plaques and tau tangles. He did that in 1906. Wow. It was not recognized as a distinct disease until the late 70s. And NIH has obviously had a program in that area. But the amount of money put into that program from between the late 70s and about 2010, 2012 was very little, a couple hundred million a year over the last eight years working with the Senate and the House, we've been able to generate now $4 billion a year into this research. Now that would say, wow, what have we gotten for it? To your question, well, the answer is that the current drug that's a disease modifying drug just approved by the FDA is called Leqembi. That drug is based on technology discovered in 2006. The answer, in part, is that the investments that we've been making in understanding the elements of this disease and how it works in the neurons in your brain really won't kick in for another couple of years. With that said, there is now a pipeline of potential therapeutic interventions which crosses not just beta amyloid and tau, but inflammation and a variety of other characteristics. There are even some neuro modulations, flickering light technologies, electricity, physics. So the fruits of that investment are really going to manifest in the coming years.

So the answer is if we compare this to cancer, we are still the little kid on the block. We are number three behind cancer and infectious diseases, but we're getting there. In terms of the funding. Now, the United States is the only country that's really stepped up to the plate. Europe has not. Japan is not. We don't know what the numbers are in China, but we believe that China is now investing in Alzheimer's research, probably close to the pace that we are. It's quantum. That is great. Its quality is improving. But China, clearly, as a nation as large as it is with the population demographics that it has, is probably got a bigger problem, bigger incentive to solve this problem than we do. Now they will use sort of nationalistic kind of approaches. If they develop a medicine, they're probably not going to release it to the rest of the world except on their terms. So it's important for us just in competition with China or for the benefit of Alzheimer's populations around the world, that the United States and Europe develop funding sources at much greater size, magnitude and scope than we have to date. 

Ric Edelman: So there's a variety of elements of this. There's the diagnostic. Do you have it or are you going to get it? There's treatment, there's cure and there's vaccine. Where would you say we are within each of those four areas? 

George Vradenburg: We do not have a disease modifying therapy on the market. This is now 116 years, 117 years after Doctor Alzheimer's founded this disease. We have, for the first time this year, approval by the FDA of a disease-modifying drug. Medicare has announced that it's not intending to cover it so that drug may fail justice. There was a drug approved last year that the Medicare didn't cover. That drug failed. So we are right now engaged, shall we say, in a strenuous and intense conversation with Medicare, about how many people will suffer if, in fact, we do not cover this drug by Medicare. That's therapies. So no disease-modifying drug on the market today.

Second, with respect to diagnostics, right now, the only way to diagnose whether you've got amyloid in the brain is effectively a PET Scan. The cost of a PET Scan is like $5,000 and Medicare doesn't reimburse for it. So quite frankly, getting a diagnosis of Alzheimer's is a bit of a tricky and financial proposition. Now opportunistically looked at this with a glass half full. We do have a disease-modifying drug, which, if Medicare covers it, it will be available to the American population by the second half of this year. 

There are now blood-based diagnostic products that are beginning to emerge on market, which will cost less than $1,000 to get diagnosed with disease and their digital cognitive assessments, rather than paper and pencil tests. That will enable us to determine whether you have the precursor clinical manifestation of some sort of cognitive decline. So that is on the good side. So vaccines are still a sort of a hopeful glint in the eye of all of us. But there are now seven companies, biotechnology companies, that are developing early-stage vaccines. Some are in clinical trials, early-stage clinical trials, most of which are still working in animal models. So I am hopeful that we can set a global goal of getting a vaccine on market by 2030. That would be less than $1,000 a person that would enable us to get access to a therapeutic intervention way before symptoms appear around the world, and particularly in the United States. So the under $1,000 a year is compared to the current price of this potential vaccine. This potential disease modifying drug at $26,500, that would be huge.

Ric Edelman: And let's in fact highlight that about Leqembi, that fact that it is $26,000, the drug before that was double that cost and Medicare. The debate in part is that Medicare's attitude is and I'm not sure how much they're willing to say this as bluntly as I am about to, but if they were to approve a drug that costs $26,000, they'd be spending as much on that drug as they pretty much spend on all their other drugs combined. This could bankrupt the Medicare system. And is that part of the reason that they are reluctant, shall we say, to saying that they'll reimburse. 

George Vradenburg: I think, Ric, that you've said it very bluntly and very correctly. I think they're concerned about their budget. Like any insurance company, you just as soon not cover, notwithstanding the fact that we pay premiums every single year, every one of us who works pays a premium every year, your insurance company is going to say, yeah, forget that benefit. You know, they'd make more money that way. So they're acting just like a commercial insurance company and trying to regulate how many people they'll actually cover with this, if any. So yes, you've absolutely put your finger on the key question, but we're now costing Medicare over $300 billion a year in taking care of us. And if we don't have a strategy to get an innovation on market that will in fact reduce those costs over time, as Roy Blunt, the former senator from Missouri, would put it, this is going to be a cost to Medicare equal to the Defense Department by 2050. So, you know, you can either go one way and say, gee, we'll just absorb those costs as part of Medicare's normal coverage of your hospital and your doctor's visits and the like and expect that budget to grow every year until 2050 and have it be the size of the Defense Department or greater. 

Or you can say, I have a strategy, says the government, to actually reduce those costs by preventing this disease. The first drug out of the out of the gate can be higher price. It's going to be lower performing then the second drug, second drug will be better, lower price, better performing the third drug and the fourth drug, increasingly lower cost and higher performance drugs. Look at the HIV situation. We had the first drug out of the gate didn't work well, but it gave hints as to how you could interrupt the HIV part of that and prevent AIDS. And so far, it took three drugs to get to the place where we now have a cocktail that you take to say HIV positive, but never die of AIDS. Now that's the goal with Alzheimer's, three drugs, four drugs, whatever it takes. But we have to start with the first drug if we're going to get there. 

Ric Edelman: So this is a certain level of optimism that you're painting. You're demonstrating there's a new level of attention, the government level and governments around the world. There's a new level of funding. There's a new level of research as a result of that funding. And you're painting a scenario of fairly good optimism that over the next several years, we're going to see this pipeline come to fruition and drugs coming to market. We've already got one and that over the next ten, 20 years, we're actually going to see cures in addition to treatments and maybe ultimately eventually getting to a vaccine. That's hopeful for sure. But what about right now? What is it, George, that you believe people can and frankly, what people should be doing to keep their brains healthy? What can we as individuals do while we're waiting for you and everyone else in the Alzheimer's world to deliver for us?

George Vradenburg: No question that recent research in the brain health area has identified 12 to 14 risk behaviors that, if addressed during the course of our lives, all of our lives from birth to 60s, it reduces the risk of getting Alzheimer's by roughly 40%. The top ones are diet. As you might imagine, the food that you put into your body has an effect on your body and how it affects your heart. It affects your diabetes, and it affects your brain. So food, watching your diet. Mediterranean diet is important as well as reasonable but not excessive use of liquor. The second most important probably is sleep. Sleep, it turns out, is the time that your brain basically disposes of toxic proteins in your brain. So getting seven and a half to eight hours of sleep a night that's quality. Sleep is an important factor in reducing your risk of later life cognitive decline activity. Just like activity is good for your heart, activity is good for your brain. increases blood flow. It keeps your brain constantly refreshed.

Next in line probably is social interaction. What you and I are doing right now? It turns out to be exercising the brain. Why? Because you have to ask me a question. I have to think about what you just asked me. I have to formulate a response and then execute a response. And then you do it the other way. The social interaction avoidance of loneliness turns out to be important. So how do you address loneliness? Hearing aids is one, right? If you can't hear a person,  you don't have that ability to socially interact. So there are a variety of things that we can do. Those are the top four, but there are others as well. And so we have to pay attention to this. Turns out that environment has an effect. The pollution in the air. Air pollution, water pollution has an effect on your body, as you might expect, and on your brain. The brain is not a distinct part, not separate from the rest of your body. You go to your doctor, he'll give you all that checkup from the neck down, but you'll never get a checkup from the neck up, right? 

Ric Edelman: All too true and all too astonishing when you put it that way. Why on earth not? So you mentioned pollution. I therefore have to assume that smoking can't be good for your brain, the internalization of that smoke into your body. But what about alcohol? Is there any research demonstrating any links there? 

George Vradenburg: Excessive use of alcohol does have a damaging effect on your brain, as does smoking. And so yes, those two things we tended to condemn more generally as a general proposition. The challenge here is not identifying what our risk producing or risk reducing behaviors. It's actually changing our behavior. You know, a lot of Americans still smoke, and smoking is more prevalent around the world. People still drink heavily, notwithstanding their understanding that that's probably not a healthy behavior, but it's an enjoyable behavior, right? So I think the problem here, the challenge is how to change behaviors. So we're starting up, we've lobbied for about three years to get the United States government to adopt a national goal for healthy aging and the reduction of risk for dementia, and the government adopted that at the very end of 2021.

We are now starting an initiative with private companies to say, private companies as an employer, caring about the wellness of their workforce and particularly the cognitive capacity of their workforce, companies as producers of goods and services for their customers who they would like to be healthy, except maybe the pharma companies. But put that aside. Basically, we want the people that use our products and services to believe that they're doing something good for their health if they use the products and services and business as a contributor to the community in terms of wanting the community in which they live and the population in which they produce their goods and services to want to be healthy. So we're beginning now to work with companies to think through how to do that at that level and potentially creating a brain healthy fund, basically, which can, you know, have a variety of investments in different sets of industries to innovate different companies or different products that will improve the brain health of the population and thus produce a healthier aging world. 

Ric Edelman: So you're one of the leaders in this effort to get the eradication of Alzheimer's you've created, as I mentioned earlier, the founding CEO of US Against Alzheimer's. Talk about that organization and its focus, different from, say, the Alzheimer's Association. 

George Vradenburg: US Against Alzheimer's was found in 2010 as a result of my late wife and my work initially raising money for the association, but deciding that we wanted to do more, try to do more than just raise money for another organization. So we started basically focusing on those segments of society most adversely affected by this disease African Americans, Latinos, women; women are two thirds of the population of Alzheimer's. Blacks have Alzheimer's at the 2 to 1 rate that whites do. Latinos are one and a half times non-Latino whites, so those segments of the population. So we focused on those segments, and we also focused on politics because it was given at the time, it was viewed as impossible to get Congress to allocate more money to one disease proportionately over another disease. So we were told that if, in fact, we tried to get Congress to allocate more money for Alzheimer's research, that it would create a war among diseases and cancer would crush us. And indeed, the first time that President Obama put just a modest additional $50 million into Alzheimer's research above and beyond what would normally occur as a result of NIH allocations, I got called the next day from the White House saying the cancer community is bombing us. We need more credit from the Alzheimer's community to be able to sustain politically and effort to increase asymmetrically the research in Alzheimer's. So we started a (c)4 organization, a PAC (political action committee); all the techniques that you use to basically get to know members of Congress make the case about the cost to America, the number of people and families suffering. And so that was our initial focus politics, inequity. 

Ric Edelman: George, does this means that because funding in the world of health care is a zero-sum game, that if you got $50 million more for Alzheimer's, that the cancer community got $50 million less. Is that the issue? 

George Vradenburg: It wasn't at the time Obama pulled it from somewhere else. He did not take anything away from cancer. No. I think the cancer community thought that they needed a greater investment in cancer at the time.

Ric Edelman: In other words, instead of giving you the 50 million, they should get the 50 million. 

George Vradenburg: They said, put the $50 million in the NIH pot, and NIH will distribute it as it always has. Well, at the time, cancer was basically getting funded at roughly $6 billion a year. We were getting funded at $400 million a year. So you would see if you put another $50 million into the NIH pot where most of that money would go. So they were an advocate for not only cancer research, but also for NIH. I met with Francis Collins (former NIH head) at the time, and he said, look, I am not going to be able to over allocate money to Alzheimer's unless and until NIH funding levels go up. At the time, they had been flat for many, many years. So we become very much champions of NIH research generally, as well as for Alzheimer's research. But we basically have had this great support of Democrats and Republicans, led in significant part by Roy Blunt, a retiring US Senator from Missouri, conservative Republican who looked at the fiscal situation as well as the human situation and said, this is intolerable. Any business executive who said they had a $300 billion problem, and they were spending less than $500 million on solving that problem, should be fired. And so we know that $300 billion cost problem to the to Medicare is going up every year. And still we're not investing in the solution. He found that inexplicable and unacceptable. And he really drove the support of Democrats. This has always been a bipartisan issue with the support of Democrats, increased funding for Alzheimer's at NIH. 

Ric Edelman: So tell me where US against Alzheimer's gets its funding. 

George Vradenburg: It gets its funding for a wide variety of sources. It gets its funding from companies. It also gets its funding from individuals. So those are basically what it is. We do get some additional funding from foundations, including the Gates Foundation and others. So it gets it from multiple, diverse sources. And indeed, as we've seen on our own experience, our major funder at the time, we started one of our major company funders and when we started was J and J. It had a drug in the pipeline. It wanted patient support for the efforts to get that through the pipeline. That drug failed in clinical trials. It stopped funding. So you'll see over the years, different companies fund us at different points in time because they want to both inform us of where they are in the drug pipeline and want our support for getting those drugs through the pipeline. We tend to be aligned with companies, except when it comes to pricing, because we obviously want drugs. Are affordable and we want drugs that Medicare can afford. So we basically when Biogen put out a $56,000 a year drug, we spent months with them urging them to reduce the price of that drug, and they reduced it by half. They cut it in half. And that is the reason why the next drug in line. So they went from $56,000 to $28,000. The next drug in line had to come in under $28,000. So the effort to try and drive down pricing to make the drugs affordable for patients affordable for Medicare is an area where we clearly sit on different sides of that line. We want affordability, they want profits. And so that is a tug of war. 

Ric Edelman: So how are you feeling today overall about the fight against Alzheimer's? Are you pessimistic or optimistic relative to the past? Are you feeling better or worse about it all? 

George Vradenburg: If it weren't for Medicare, I feel a lot better. You know, the innovation that's occurring in industry is significant. It's marked, it's measurable. It's visible. FDA has changed its posture over the last 2 to 3 years from one which was basically saying no to saying, how do we get to yes? We want to look at the science, we want to understand the science, but we are leaning forward. Now, if you can demonstrate that the science of disease intervention is going to produce a clinical benefit, will be supportive of that product. Medicare hasn't gotten there yet, and Medicare is doing and following. Clearly, the political winds in Washington on the Democratic side tend to be pharmaceutical pricing is too high. How can we force it down either through price regulation or through triaging and rationing? What Medicare benefits can be made available to the American people? So that is a wave in Washington. And even though there's a bipartisanship to this issue, as President Biden is going out and saying to the Republicans, you guys are trying to cut back on Medicare, the Republicans are coming back at him saying, and you're denying Alzheimer's victims a drug that could really slow down and improve their lives.

So this is becoming partisan. We don't like that. We want this issue to be bipartisan. This disease does not know a Republican from a Democrat and quite frankly, we want everyone, Republicans and Democrats, to have access to these drugs. So I'm feeling as if we're at a potential turning point here. If this drug could get covered by Medicare and companies will see that there's a path to market, they will invest more in innovative products. And hopefully Europeans would follow us, and Japan would follow them. The Leqembi product is pending regulatory approval in Europe and in Japan and in China. And so if those governments are prepared to approve release of the drug to the market as safe and effective, and their payer systems are going to reimburse the patients for the use of those drugs, I think we are in for a real fascinating period of innovation in getting at this disease. 

Ric Edelman: We've been talking with George Vradenburg. He is the founding chairman of the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative and also the founding CEO of US Against Alzheimer's. I encourage you to get involved. This is, as George says, a pivotal point in the timeline for Alzheimer's, and it's an opportunity for you to encourage your elected representatives in Washington to get behind this, to learn more how you can be supportive of us against Alzheimer's and to frankly, financially support their efforts. I encourage you to go to their website, US Against Alzheimer's dot org. The link to both US Against Alzheimer's and the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative is both in our show notes today, and I encourage you to get involved. And most importantly, as George has articulated, do what you need to do to take care of your brain. Don't wait for the government to fix your brain for you. And that might have come out wrong. George Vradenburg, thank you so much for joining us today. Greg. 

George Vradenburg: Thank you very much for having me. Have a good day. 

Ric Edelman: Thanks for joining us today. Be sure to join me all next week. I'm going to be podcasting for you from CES in Las Vegas, the annual Consumer Electronics Show. I'll be there all week looking at the newest tech that's coming in our future, some of it this year. I'm going to tell you all about it all next week. Starts on Monday. Be sure to listen. Have a great weekend. See you Monday. 

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