Vicki Matthews has always been a sharp woman — she was a librarian, well-read and fond of words. But about 10 years ago, her family noticed that she was growing more forgetful. She started losing track of where she was going or where she had just been. Then, she was forgetting to pay bills, or sometimes double-paying them.
It took years for Matthews to receive a formal diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Today, she is in the moderate stages of the disease, although you might not know it right away.
“She can frequently fool people,” Matthews’ daughter, Romi Lessig said, sitting on the couch at her mother’s house in Austin. “They'll think, ‘Oh, we had this great conversation.’ And they'll come back to her an hour later and she'll look at them [blankly].”
“It’s a good excuse,” Matthews quipped, chuckling at her own joke.
Matthews and Lessig are in the same boat as a lot of other Texans. Around 460,000 people in Texas are living with Alzheimer’s, according to the state health department. That includes nearly 12% of adults over the age of 65. Some 1.1 million family members are contributing to their caregiving.
Those numbers are likely to increase along with Texas’ senior population, which is the fastest-growing age demographic in the state.
Texas lawmakers moved to address the growing issue this year, passing a bipartisan bill to create the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, or DPRIT. On Tuesday, voters will decide on Proposition 14, a measure that would fund DPRIT with $3 billion from the state’s general revenue fund.
Joanne Pike, CEO and president of the national nonprofit the Alzheimer’s Association, said she believes DPRIT will build more diagnosis and treatment infrastructure in Texas for Alzheimer’s.
“Right now, we know that it is far too difficult for Texans to get an early or accurate diagnosis,” Pike said. “We know that there are neurology deserts and that many primary care physicians lack the specialized training necessary to provide appropriate care.”
Proponents of DPRIT also hope the investment will attract top researchers and physicians in the neurology field — and create a major research engine that could lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia and brain disease.
There is already a blueprint for the program: Texas’ Cancer Prevention and Research Institute. Approved by voters in 2007, CPRIT turned Texas into the second-largest funder of cancer research in America, after the National Cancer Institute. It has helped attract several hundred cancer scholars to Texas, including a Nobel laureate.
Joan Huffman, the Republican state senator who authored the DPRIT bill, made the comparison late last year on a panel discussing the new legislation.
“We brought in some incredible researchers and scientists, and I don't think anyone would disagree that what has happened in cancer research hasn't saved many, many lives,” Huffman said. “We want to do the same for dementia-related diseases.”
DPRIT would work mostly by issuing grants to researchers and groups at a time when federal grant funding for medical research has become more uncertain. Although Congress has recently signaled its support for increasing funding for Alzheimer’s research, some NIH-funded grants were canceled or interrupted by the Trump administration this year.
Romi Lessig said uncertainty at the federal level is one reason why she will be voting for Proposition 14.
“The one inescapable [thing] about Alzheimer's is time is not your friend,” she said. “We cannot wait for the federal government.”
Time, Lessig knows, is not on her mother’s side. While there is promising research out there, she does not expect a cure will arrive in time to help her mom. But she is hopeful that research driven by DPRIT can help prevent future cases of the disease — and develop new supports for caregivers like herself.
“There's going to be a day she's going to look at me and not know who the hell I am, and part of me is going to die that day,” Lessig said. “But part of me will still be there, and part of me will not want to go down that path. It’s not because I don't want the disease — I don't want my children to see it.”
She doesn’t want her kids to worry that their mother will one day have their grandmother’s disease. That, she believes, is preventable.
Support for KUT's reporting on health news comes from St. David’s Foundation. Sponsors do not influence KUT's editorial decisions.
