As I said earlier, I think that education of both the public and the primary care health providers would be extremely important in preventing or early detection of the disease and therefore early intervention. As I said, if you can intervene earlier, you can probably slow the progress. So I think the strategy around education is really a relatively inexpensive way of addressing some of the early problems that people with dementia have.
I will just give you an example with my own case. My son lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. Early on, he said to me, “There's something wrong with mom, because she can't find her way home when she goes out on the street.” I said, “All the houses here look the same. They're all brown adobe houses. What's the problem?” Given that I was living with her, I didn't see it, but my children who were not seeing her on a regular basis did see it.
I think this whole concept of education is extremely important, and it goes back to the whole issue of removing the stigma, which allows people to come forth.
I know, for example, that when my wife was diagnosed, friends of 60 years disappeared. They totally disappeared. Family disappeared. Colleagues disappeared. No one visits my wife except me and my daughter--virtually no one. I think if someone has cancer or someone has heart disease, that doesn't occur. People continue to participate. People just don't know what do when someone develops dementia. They don't know how to react. I think this whole concept of what it is, how you deal with it, how people identify it early, is really critical to the strategy, from my perspective.