Sometimes during those last few months, Joann slips into her bedroom and begins to twirl. She no longer recognizes her home or family. But she remakes her 89-year-old body into a memory of the girl she’d been. She dances to music only she can hear. 
 
A clarion call is coming from Starr County in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley: it’s time to reimagine the fight against Alzheimer’s. The decades-long search for a miracle drug isn’t enough. Instead, recent data shows funds must be invested into understanding the impact of chronic stress, poor nutrition, too few doctors and too little education.
 
In Starr, nearly one in four over the age of 65 are reported to have Alzheimer’s, compared with one in 14 nationwide. In this terrain of close-knit families, loved ones turned care-givers express frustration with the disease’s stigma, the limited resources to fight it, and what Alzheimer’s robs from them.

Dedicated project website can be seen here. 

This project was supported by Magnum Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund and published in The Atlantic.