dr. petersen, it's great to see both of you again. thank you for coming back to update us and thank you for your continuing work. and dr. wierman when you have conversations with your patients, can you broach the subject? do you tell them what they're going to have to plan? because here's a report in "the washington post" that says that less than half the people with alzheimer's reported that they had been told about their dementia. so what do you do when you advise your patients? heidi: i work with folks with dementia at all stages so what they hear is different at different stages. early on it's about the diagnosis and what treatments are available. and where they're at now, addressing current issues. usually in subsequent visits it's about future planning and that involves them and their caregivers or surrogate decisionmakers assuring they have a plan in place for what they want to do, what's important to them. but also includes looking at what their financial situation is and understanding what's realistic for them to plan for in t

dr. petersen. i was -- i'm on the budget committee and we have the budget on the floor so i vent been here for the whole hearing. could you be a little bit more specific about what you think the prospects are or a cure, how confident you are, how many viable paths towards a cure there are so that a nondoctor like me can get a sense of how much confidence we can have? ronald: thank you, senator whitehouse. difficult question to answer, of course. there is enough exciting research. this is a complex disease. it's not just a single cell disease but really involves networks in the brain so there are multiple targets out there and we're somewhat encouraged by a report just last week that one of the drugs that's under investigation for alzheimer's disease to remove one of the culprits, the plaques, the amyloid plaques in the brain. one result indicated in fact there may be a path forward for this therapeutic in so far the plaquing were reduced as they measured them in patients over the year and the patie