The U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing to encourage passage of bipartisan legislation Building Our Largest Dementia (BOLD) Infrastructure for Alzheimer’s Act (S. 2076 / H.R. 4256). The act would direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to establish Alzheimer’s Centers of Excellence, award cooperative agreements to public health departments and increase data collection, analysis and data reporting.
The importance of this legislation is supported by the fact that deaths in the U.S. from Alzheimer’s disease increased 55 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to the CDC. More than five million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease and without significant efforts to change the current trajectory, as many as 16 million people will have Alzheimer’s disease by 2050.
