Gottheimer Addresses New Jersey Forum on Alzheimer’s Crisis
2026-08-12
Silence carried the sharpest data point in Waldwick Borough, where a small community room filled with the halting pauses and repeated questions that define Alzheimer’s long before any scan does. Around that table, memory loss was not an abstraction but an everyday negotiation over car keys, medication boxes, and names that no longer land.
What looked like another local listening session was, in practice, a blunt audit of how the health system handles neurodegeneration. U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer convened patients, family caregivers, neurologists, geriatric specialists, advocates and municipal officials to argue that by the time “severe cognitive impairment” appears in an electronic health record, the system has already failed. Clinicians pressed for broader use of neuropsychological assessment and biomarker testing, including amyloid PET imaging, so diagnosis happens when behavioral changes first surface, not after a crisis visit.
Equally stark was the economic arithmetic voiced by caregivers, who described quitting jobs, draining savings and juggling unpaid labor that never shows up in gross domestic product. Specialists pointed to the mismatch between rising eligibility for disease‑modifying therapies and the limited reimbursement for care coordination, occupational therapy and respite programs. Advocates urged Gottheimer to leverage his committee assignments to protect National Institutes of Health research appropriations and to push for a more stable federal match for state-level dementia services, arguing that without sustained funding, every incremental advance in clinical trials risks remaining out of reach for the households bearing the disease’s daily weight.
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