on. reporter: today alzheimer s is the sixth leading cause of death in the united states. it kills more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. since 2000, while the number of people who died of heart disease dropped 14%, the number of people who died from alzheimer s increased 89%. was there a personal connection for you? y he es. my family, including several of the men in my family, have had this disease. so i m seeing how tough it is. that is not my sole motivation but played in. i would say i would be disappointed that, you know, thinking about complex problems and i hope i can live a long time without those limitations. it s amaze to go me, sanjay,
are today. so, yes, i believe there is a solution. reporter: deep inside the brain, billions of cells work to create memories by sending messages through a neural highway. electrical signals passing through junctions called synapses where chemicals call neurotransmitters leap across the gap, carrying the message to more and more neurons. but in alzheimer s, these pathways become blocked by unusual proteins called amyloid and tao that clump and tangle, affecting memory, personality, and eventually basic functions of the brain. people look at the immune system of the brain, the idea that your cells just run out of energy, that the energy engine get broken down. so a lot of great science going on. reporter: today alzheimer s is the sixth leading cause of death in the united states. it kills more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. since 2000, while the number of people who have died from heart disease has dropped by 14%, the
body pain? motrin helps you be an unstoppable, i-can-totally-do-this- all-in-one-trip kind of woman. when pain tries to stop you, there s motrin. motrin works fast to stop pain where it starts. make it happen with new motrin liquid gels. we re back. it s been described as a slow motion time bomb and there is no cure. i watched my own mother fight alzheimer s disease for a decade. it s a long good-bye. more than 5 million people in the u.s. suffer from it. it s a bigger killer than both breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. the big question are we doing anything we can to fight it? i spoke to actor/comedian seth rogan about it last year. he watched his mother-in-law
the devastating earthquake in nepal has wreaked havoc and destruction, killing many thousands. it s a tragedy that deserves the world s attention, but this week we wanted to alert you to some other mortal threats to humanity that gets far less attention than earthquakes but are just as important to keep in mind. for example, in 2013 more people were killed by drowning compared to natural disasters. road injuries killed more people than malaria. suicide killed almost twice as many people as breast cancer. and falls killed almost as many people as leukemia and prostate cancer combined. all of these surprising statistics come from one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors ever attempted. a project that s been compared to the human genome project. it s called the global burden of disease study, a gargantuan effort to track just about every death around the world involving more than 1,000 investigators
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