44 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's or related dementia. That's roughly the population of Spain, except they're all slowly forgetting who and where they are. And probably whether they're Spanish.
5.8 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's. "Living" is generous - they're existing while their brains delete their files in no particular order. It's like if your computer's hard drive decided to randomly uninstall programs, except the computer is your brain and the programs are your memories of your children's names.
Alzheimer's is called that because it was discovered by Alois Alzheimer in 1906. He was a German psychiatrist who noticed that one of his patients was forgetting everything. Then he examined her brain after she died and found plaques and tangles. That's the medical term for "brain got messy." To this day, we still don't know exactly what causes it, but we gave it a name, so at least we can talk about not understanding it more professionally.
The NIH spent $1.9 billion on Alzheimer's research in 2018. That sounds like a lot until you do math.
Here's the math: $1.9 billion ÷ 5.8 million Americans = $327 per victim per year.
For comparison, Americans spend about $1,200 per year on alcohol. You spend nearly four times more on forgetting things temporarily than on curing the disease that makes you forget things permanently. One type of forgetting is reversible and fun. The other type is permanent and tragic. The fun reversible one gets 4x more funding per capita. Priorities are what you call it when you rank things in order of importance.
This is what you're doing with math.
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