It's one of the holy grails of science: a cure for Alzheimer's. Currently, there is no treatment to stop the disease, let alone slow its progression. And billionaire Bill Gates thinks he will change that. In this CNN story, Dr. Sanjay Gupta profiles Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his mission to cure Alzheimer's.
"I believe there is a solution," Gates told Gupta without hesitation.
"Any type of treatment would be a huge advance from where we are today," he said, but "the long-term goal has got to be cure."
Gates hopes to find a cure to a disease that now steals the memories and other cognitive functions of 47 million people around the world.
For Gates, the fight is personal. He is investing $50 million of his own money into the Dementia Discovery Fund, a private-public research partnership focused on some of the more novel ideas about what drives the brain disease, such as looking at a brain cell's immune system.
Today, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, where a new case is diagnosed every 66 seconds. More than 5 million Americans live with the disease, at a cost of $259 billion a year. Without any treatment, those numbers are projected to explode to 16 million Americans with the disease, at a cost of over $1 trillion a year, by 2050.
Watch the CNN video and read full article here:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/health/bill-gates-announcement-alzheimers/index.html