Today we learned about the Rotary CART program — Coins for Alzheimer’s Research Trust — where club members can donate their change each week, helping fund efforts to cure or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Today's guests were Meegen White, program manager, and Gabi Shifflett, development manager, for the Greater Maryland Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Formed in 1980, the association is the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care, support and research. They said the disease is both a financial expense on the community (high cost of care) and an emotional expense because it consumes families and partners who have to deal with it 24 hours a day every day.
New county data on Alzheimer’s shows that Baltimore City tied for first with Miami/Dade County, Florida and the Bronx, New York, for having the highest prevalence of disease in individuals over 65 - about 16.6% of them with Alzheimer's or another dementia. Also, Prince George's County and Baltimore County were high in the top 10. Those combined factors give Maryland the unfortunate distinction of being the state with the highest estimated prevalence of Alzheimer's disease.
“That’s not something to celebrate for sure, but something to motivate us to work harder in the public health sphere to figure out why and what we can do about it,” Megeen said. “How can we move forward with research and increase the public's awareness, decrease stigma and see what we can do about prevention?”
Alzehimer’s research allows scientists to not only focus on things that we know about the disease and attack from that angle, but also to look at all aspects such as access to good quality medical care, access to nutritional food, access to an environment that's not filled with pollution, not only genetics and family history. “Here in Maryland, we have 11 active studies being funded by the association at a number of sites,” Megeen said. “As of 2025, each county’s agency on aging will have a dementia care navigation program that will be funded by the state. The idea is that families who have a connection to the disease can receive resources, support, education, etc. A lot of the counties are partnering with the association to make that happen.”
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