Ronald Petersen, Ph.D., M.D.

How Mayo Clinic Touches Me

"We're at a crisis point in the U.S. right now because the baby boomers are aging into the period of risk for Alzheimer's disease at the same time that federal funding for research is declining. So, philanthropy at Mayo Clinic is critically important such that we can have an impact on this impending health care crisis before it occurs.

I specialize in the area of Alzheimer's disease research or memory disorders and that means that I spend part of my time seeing patients and part of my time doing research as well.

So, a good deal of our work is focused on this area of developing predictive tests, perhaps blood tests, perhaps genetic profile, maybe imaging tests putting all these features together to see which individuals are in fact more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as they age.

There is an award in the field of neurology that is akin to the Nobel Prize for Alzheimer's disease research and there have been several investigators at the Mayo Clinic over the past several years who have received these awards.

If we were to have an impact on Alzheimer's disease, we would need to be able to prevent the whole process. This would take predictive testing while people are still normal before they develop symptoms and then therapies that, if introduced at that point in time, would in fact prevent the disease from appearing in the future.

Every donation to the research program regardless of how small or large has an important impact on the program."