Did the World Just Gain Hundreds of Millions of Alzheimer’s Patients?

The New Yorker · Manvir Singh · 2026-11-02 11:00 UTC

Manvir Singh on a new definition of Alzheimer’s that has polarized researchers and clinicians.

The mood matched the spectacle. Joanne Pike, the Alzheimer’s Association’s president and C.E.O., announced that recent advances had brought the campaign against the disease to a “pivotal moment.” Maria Carrillo, its chief science officer, hailed a groundswell of progress.

That optimism followed decades of disappointment. Between 1974 and 2020, the U.S. government spent roughly twenty billion dollars on Alzheimer’s research without seeing the approval of a single treatment designed to act on the disease’s underlying biology, let alone stop or reverse its course. Today, Alzheimer’s afflicts roughly one in nine Americans over sixty-five and, along with related dementias, has been estimated to cost the economy about three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year. In surveys, it ranks with cancer as the disease people fear most.

That’s understandable. Alzheimer’s dismantles the self by degrees. It typically starts by robbing patients of recent memories—conversations they just had, where they put important objects—before corroding the basic functions of adult independence, from paying bills to managing medications. Eventually, it leaves patients unable to speak, move, swallow, or recognize close relatives. “We estimate a man by how much he remembers,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, about a decade before an Alzheimer’s-like dementia left him scarcely able to write his name.

Read the full story at The New Yorker · All coverage of this story