Money Cuts May Cripple Research on Alzheimer’s, Official Says

With a yearly budget for medical research less than half the cost of a single Midgetman missile, the nation’s 10 Alzheimer’s disease research centers consume a microscopic portion of the nation’s near-trillion dollar budget.

Nevertheless, the leading scientists who specialize in Alzheimer’s warned Thursday at a meeting at UC San Diego that the Gramm-Rudman balanced budget law would slash research money enough to slow or even destroy momentum in understanding the crippling age-related senility. Currently there is $45 million allocated annually to research the disease that affects more than 2 million elderly Americans.

“There have been mind-boggling achievements in the past seven years, more remarkable than those made during the Manhattan Project (to build the first nuclear bomb), because with Alzheimer’s we really started from a knowledge base of nearly zero,” said Zaven S. Khachaturian, director of the Alzheimer’s program at the federal National Institute of Aging of Bethesda, Md., which funds the research centers.

Khachaturian spoke in La Jolla at the first of planned annual meetings--this one sponsored by UCSD--of directors and associates of the nationwide centers.

“We’re saying that it costs $40 billion a year to care for the patients and families ($27 billion alone in nursing home costs),” said Dr. Robert Katzman, head of the UCSD center. “So $45 million is so little money involved for research compared to what we spend treating it.”

Katzman called Alzheimer’s, along with AIDS, the major diseases of recent discovery that, if not controlled, will prove devastating to millions of Americans.

Gramm-Rudman, named after the two U.S. senators who sponsored the measure, imposes mandatory percentage budget cuts on almost all federal programs beginning this year as a way to obtain a balanced budget by 1991.

Despite its small budget, the Alzheimer’s program would be slashed between 4.5% and 15%, according to Khachaturian. Even though Khachaturian is a member of the Reagan Administration as director of the program, he hopes Congress will make an exception for the program if necessary.

The disease was first described in 1906 by German physician Alois Alzheimer, but until the late 1960s it remained poorly understood and was lumped into a general category of dementias.

Using federal research grants, scientists have learned, with a fair amount of certainty, that the disease has a genetic basis, even though precise mechanisms of how it occurs still elude them.

Federal monies have allowed scientists to look at families in which members of several generations have had the disease.

Research into sets of families that show the same pattern of disease is consistent with the hypothesis that a single gene may set the stage for an early beginning to Alzheimer’s in certain individuals, said Dr. George Martin of the University of Washington Alzheimer’s center.

Scientists believe that if that hypothesis is confirmed, they can discover ways to regulate it so that the gene will not “turn on” Alzheimer’s until perhaps after someone turns 100, an age beyond the life span of most people.

But without continued funding--and preferably at increased levels--the high cost of molecular neurology research cannot be sustained and the scientists’ excitement will dissipate, scientists say.

“And you’re left with the tremendous costs of housing the people who have the (incurable) disease,” said Caleb Finch of the University of Southern California. “It is as if the polio battle had been fought not by finding (the vaccine) but instead by building bigger and better iron lungs.”