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Sparkle (3)
Try to remember what you were doing a minute ago. Got it? Now wrap your brains around this: In the past minute, another American developed a fatal disease that will slowly erase the personality and a lifetime of memories. That person will either die with that disease or from it, because there is no cure. That disease is Alzheimer’s, and it’s a growing national epidemic.
Right now, Alzheimer’s disease is like an earthquake rumbling deep in the core of our society, and women are at its epicenter. Women are fully two-thirds of the people with Alzheimer’s. They are also 60 percent of the unpaid caregivers of loved ones who have it. In every way, Alzheimer’s is a mind-blowing disease -- not just for the people who get it, but for everyone around them.
Believe me, I know. When my father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed back in 2003, my mother, four brothers and I all felt we were entering a world that was confusing, dark and depressing. People just didn’t talk about Alzheimer’s when it hit their families. It was a diagnosis shrouded in shame, and there was little information and even less hope. That’s why today, I’m passionate about defeating it.
So on October 15th, I released The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Takes Alzheimer’s, a groundbreaking effort produced in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Association. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary snapshot of women as caregivers, breadwinners and people living with this disease. This is a follow-up to last year’s Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, which looked at the transformational change that has overtaken our country as women have become about half of all US workers, while still being our primary caregivers. We found that the way we are in America has changed, now that two-thirds of mothers are primary or co-breadwinners. Husbands and wives reported that they now regularly negotiate their schedules and their joint responsibilities. We saw that attitudes and behaviors are evolving, but our institutions have not kept up.
This year we’ve focused our Shriver Report on the Alzheimer’s epidemic as another tipping-point issue for American society, one that has the potential to shift the way we live yet again.
When we call it an epidemic, we’re not exaggerating. Next year the first of 78 million baby boomers turn 65, at the same time life expectancies are greater than they’ve ever been. That means the proportion of our population living long enough to need care is growing like crazy. As a result, more and more of us will have to care for more and more loved ones with Alzheimer’s. As a daughter of Alzheimer’s myself, I know firsthand that having a person with it in your family isn’t like dealing with any other kind of illness. The duration of the care required -- the financial cost and the emotional and physical stress and strain on the family -- are all much greater.
Our Report includes a landmark nationwide poll, which found that 27 percent of Americans have someone in their family with Alzheimer’s. We found that the profile of an average Alzheimer’s caregiver is a married woman about 50 years old, working full- or part-time, most likely looking after her mother. Most of these women provide a whopping 40-plus hours of Alzheimer’s care a week. Many of them are also looking after their children.
We also found that 56 percent of Americans overall know someone with the disease -- and 90 percent of people who know someone with Alzheimer’s said they were concerned that they or someone they know will develop the disease.
There’s plenty of reason for that concern. Today, half of women aged 85 have Alzheimer’s, but the number of people with Alzheimer’s is expected to triple over the next 40 years. At the same time, we don’t have a corresponding boom in caregivers. We don’t have an infrastructure of professional caregivers trained for Alzheimer’s. Neither do we have a business community ready to provide the workplace flexibility needed by our unpaid family caregivers who also hold down jobs.
We certainly don’t have the financial resources to cover Medicare, Medicaid
