Matthew Schrag

No one's getting better with these drugs.

Every scientist who works with them, every clinician, will say the same.

If they don't, they're lying.

My name is Charles Piller.

I am an investigative journalist with Science Magazine and author of the book Doctored.

I grew up in the Chicago area.

I became interested in reporting kind of the way that so many people, boomers like me, did, being inspired by the Watergate investigations.

I was too young to be a journalist then, but not too young to be inspired and thinking about things, particularly during the Vietnam War period and all of the societal challenges there.

Well, the answer is, to me, pretty clear, and that is that unlike cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and myriad other ailments that afflict us, Alzheimer's disease is something that the nation and the world has spent tens of billions of dollars on in recent decades, and yet we have no cure.

that arrests or reverses the terrible cognitive decline of the disease.

And so even though there may be corruption in cancer research or in heart disease research, we've seen enormous advances in those diseases and sometimes even real cures for specific ailments that have benefited society dramatically.

We have not seen that in Alzheimer's disease, and that makes it not just more tragic but also terrifying for people who are facing those possible symptoms.

Yeah, it's a great question.

And I would say that care and prevention is one of the key things that I think our society should be increasingly concerned about.

It's well known that people who are subject to highly polluted environments are experiencing Alzheimer's at a higher rate and also at a more severe age of onset, earlier age of onset.

Secondly, I would say that like so many ailments in our society, Alzheimer's is in part a disease of inequality.

Now, of course, anyone from any economic level can get the disease, but it's more prevalent among people who do not have the same level of economic opportunities.

I think it's both things.

Clearly, problems like obesity

are important in Alzheimer's disease.