With a large aging population, Florida is an epicenter of Alzheimer’s cases in the United States. Roughly half a million people in the state live with the disease and by 2025, that number is projected to increase by 44 percent.Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and University of Florida Health just got 1.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to run the only full-time Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in the state to try and combat these numbers.
The center will receive $1.5 million with 5 years of optional renewal to help pay for early diagnosis outreach and research efforts.
One of the main areas of clinical research will be how Alzheimer’s affects people from different ethnic backgrounds.
“We’re trying to understand how these lifestyles and other genetic factors and other risk factors operate to either increase risk or decrease risk,” said Ranjan Duara, medical director of the Wien Center for Alzheimer's Disease at Mount Sinai.
The partnership with the University of Florida is designed to encourage researchers to share their findings with each other.
The center will become one of 30 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers around the country -- funding for a previous center ran out in 2010.
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