Every year, the Alzheimer’s Association releases its annual Facts and Figures report. In 2025, nearly four in five Americans said they wanted to know if they had the disease; this year, the report found Americans want to know how to protect their brain health.
While people value brain health as much as physical health, but they don’t really know how to protect it, the report said.
And that’s important. Just ask Bob Ehlers, who has early onset Alzheimer's. Even before he was formally diagnosed, he knew something was terribly wrong.
“I got lost riding my bike home from work a couple of times,” he says. “I forgot what we were doing at work on a major project.”
Ehlers was 58 when he was finally diagnosed. He’s now 64. After he was accepted into a clinical trial, he decided to make some changes — all to keep his brain healthy
“I stopped drinking diet sodas. I started walking my dogs about 4 miles a day," Ehlers said.
Terri Spitz, the executive director of the Alzheimer's Association in Phoenix, said knowing that there are things we can do — sleeping well, staying in school, eating right, maintaining healthy blood pressure and challenging your brain — offers hope because "this could be treated as a chronic disease, and it could be managed more effectively, and it won't be looked at as a death sentence to people.”
More than 151,000 Arizonans over the age of 65 are living with Alzheimer’s. That number hasn’t changed from last year.
Spitz says that has to do with lagging data, as well as the fact that people under the age of 65 — people like Ehlers — are not included in the count; neither are tribal members.
For Ehlers, educating the public about Alzheimer's disease is deeply personal: He has two adult children, and his biggest fear is that they might develop the disease.
"But I'm also hopeful that it will be cured or eradicated," Ehlers said.
See the 2026 Arizona fact sheet
