The Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2023 was held (again) in Amsterdam and ran from July 16-20. You may recall that it was entirely on line in 2020, and I attended the whole thing for free. But this year, I'd have had to pay for the same level of access. So I picked off interesting information from news releases and stories.
The value of attending the conference is finding out first hand about the most exciting recent breakthroughs in Alzheimer' research from around the world. The headline for the conference this year was the ongoing success in trials of donanemab, a new generation monoclonal antibody. Apparently phase 3 trials have gone well, and FDA approval may be on the horizon.
We've
been writing about donanemab since 2019. But something else I saw that was interesting was a breakdown of which localities in the United States have the highest rates of Alzheimer's disease. Which will lead to a question of why the rate in some region might be higher than in another. The research was published in the journal, Alzheimer's and Dementia; Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.
First, the states with the highest rates of people over the age of 65 living with Alzheimer's disease were Maryland, New York, and Mississippi. Then, to break things down further, the counties with the highest rates were Miami-Dade County in Florida, Baltimore city in Maryland, and Bronx County in New York. In each of these, about 16.6 percent of senior residents had the disease. The next highest was Prince George’s County, Maryland, with 16.1 percent.
What was important here is that the locations with the highest rates had minority populations. This points to the fact that we need a population of study subjects that has a much broader representation of the general population. The current population is mostly white baby-boomers.
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