WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration declared Alzheimer’s one of the country’s biggest health challenges on Tuesday, adopting a national strategy that sets the clock ticking toward better treatments by 2025 — along with help for suffering families today.

“What we know is a lot more needs to be done and it needs to be done right now, because people with Alzheimer’s disease and their loved ones and caregivers need help right now,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in announcing the first National Alzheimer’s Plan.

Among the first steps: A new website — www.alzheimers.gov — that Sebelius called a one-stop shop for families who need easy-to-understand information about dementia and to learn where to get help in their own communities.

This summer, doctors and other health providers can start getting some free training on how to spot the early signs of Alzheimer’s and the best ways to care for those patients.

And scientists are rolling up their sleeves, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told a meeting of the world’s top Alzheimer’s scientists — gathered to decide the top priorities to help meet that ambitious goal of better treatments, perhaps even ways to stall the disease, by 2025.

“We are at an exceptional moment,” with more important new discoveries about Alzheimer’s in just the last few months than in recent years, Collins said.

The NIH will spend an extra $50 million on Alzheimer’s research this year, and among the new studies of possible therapies is a nasal spray that sends insulin straight to the brain. It might sound strange, but research has linked diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and Collins said pilot testing suggested the insulin spray improved brain function.

Already, 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementias. Barring a research breakthrough, those numbers will jump by 2050, when up to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s. It’s the sixth-leading killer, and there is no cure. Treatments only temporarily ease some symptoms.

Beyond the suffering, it’s a budget-busting disease for Medicare, Medicaid and families. Caring for people with dementia will cost the U.S. $200 billion this year alone, and $1 trillion by 2050, the Alzheimer’s Association estimates.

Even that staggering figure doesn’t fully reflect the toll. Sufferers lose the ability to do the simplest activities of daily life and can survive that way for a decade or more. Family members provide most of the care, unpaid, and too often their own health crumbles under the stress.

“My wife goes away a little bit every day,” Charles Zimmerman of Gettysburg, Pa., said in a video included on the government website to help other families learn what they’ll be facing. “Today is the best she’s ever going to be.”

The National Alzheimer’s Plan, required by Congress, takes a two-pronged approach: focusing on future treatments plus help for families suffering today. Beyond the initial steps, it lays out a variety of ways that federal and state government plus private and nonprofit organizations need to collaborate to battle Alzheimer’s — from earlier diagnosis to creating more resources to help families with long-term care of their loved ones at home.

Sebelius pledged that the government will track progress yearly and adjust the plan as needed.

“This is a strong plan that promises important progress when implemented,” said Harry Johns, president of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Sweet, tender scallops need very little cooking. In fact, to remain delicate and flavorful, they should be cooked only a few minutes over high heat in a skillet large enough to hold them in one layer without touching. The result will be a crusty coating while the inside remains juicy.

Helpful Hints:

• Buy good quality Parmesan cheese and ask the market to grate it for you or chop it in the food processor. Freeze extra for quick use. You can quickly spoon out what you need and leave the rest frozen.
• Bijol or turmeric can be substituted for saffron. Although the flavor will be altered, the dish is still very good.
• Small bay scallops can be used instead of the large sea scallops. Reduce cooking time to 1 minute per side.

Countdown:

1. Start pilaf.
2. Make scallops.
3. Finish pilaf.

SAFFRON VEGETABLE PILAF

1 teaspoon olive oil

{ cup frozen, chopped onion

{ cup portobello mushrooms, sliced

{ cup long-grain white rice

1 cup fat-free, low-sodium chicken broth

\ teaspoon saffron threads

1 cup frozen peas

Salt and fresh ground black pepper

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Heat olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and mushrooms. Saute 3 minutes. Add rice and saute one minute. Add chicken broth and saffron. Bring liquid to a simmer, cover with a lid and cook 10 minutes. Add peas and continue to simmer, covered, 3 minutes. Liquid should be absorbed and rice cooked through. Simmer a few more minutes if needed. Add salt and pepper to taste, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and serve with scallops.

Per serving: 305 calories, 40 calories from fat, 4.5 g fat, 1 g saturated, 54 mg cholesterol, 12 g protein, 54 g carbohydrates, 6 g fiber, 370 mg sodium, 7 g sugars.

Exchanges/choices: 3 starch, 1 vegetable, 1 fat

SAUTEED SCALLOPS

2 teaspoons olive oil

} pound large scallops

{ tablespoon flour

{ cup dry vermouth

{ cup fat-free, low-sodium chicken broth

2 tablespoons heavy cream

Salt and fresh ground black pepper

Heat oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add scallops and saute 2 { minutes on each side. Remove scallops to a plate and add flour to pan. Add vermouth to the pan, raise the heat to high and reduce the liquid by half, about 1 minute. Add chicken broth and reduce by half again, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in the cream. Add salt and pepper to taste. Return scallops to the pan just to warm through, about { minute, and serve.

Per serving: 250 calories, 55 calories from fat, 6 g fat, 1 g saturated, 70 mg cholesterol, 31 g protein, 4 g carbohydrates, 0 g fiber, 475 mg sodium, 2 g sugars.

Exchanges/Choices: 4 lean meat, ({ alcohol equivalent)

SHOPPING LIST

Here are the ingredients you’ll need for tonight’s Dinner in Minutes.

To buy: 1 small package portobello mushrooms (1 oz needed), 1 small carton heavy cream, 1 small piece Parmesan cheese, } pound large scallops, 1 small package saffron threads, 1 small bottle, dry vermouth, 1 small package frozen peas, 1 small package frozen, chopped onion.

Staples: Olive oil, flour, long-grain white rice, fat-free, low-sodium chicken broth, salt and black peppercorns

(From “Mix’n'Match Meals in Minutes for People with Diabetes” by Linda Gassenheimer, published by the American Diabetes Association. Reprinted with permission from The American Diabetes Association. To order this book call 1-800-232-6733 or order online at http://store.diabetes.org)

Distributed by MCT Information Services

LAS VEGAS (AP) — He had a Las Vegas wedding to attend, but Bryan Dalia was hung over from some marathon partying the night before.

“I did two bachelor parties, back-to-back,” Dalia said, putting his hand to his forehead as he recalled steins of beer and shots of alcohol the previous afternoon at the Hofbrauhaus Las Vegas, then gambling, dining and drinking martinis at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas resort. He remembered “getting a little lost and finding myself on the floor of the Paris” hotel-casino, then “a few more martinis as I gambled my life away.”

“How are you doing now?” medical technician Debra Lund asked.

Dalia looked at Lund, swaying with the gentle rocking of a bus named Hangover Heaven as it rolled down Las Vegas Boulevard. Lund checked an intravenous fluid bag, hung from the ceiling, dripping a saline and vitamin solution into Dalia’s left arm.

“Better,” he replied. “My palms aren’t sweating anymore. I don’t have that, like, cold sweat feeling anymore.”

Dalia, from Caldwell, N.J., was one of the first patients on the rollout day of a mobile treatment center for tourists who spent the night before drinking in all the nightlife Las Vegas has to offer. For a fee, they get a quick morning-after way to rehydrate, rejuvenate and resume their revelry.

“I’m starting to feel great,” Dalia said. “This is really very cool.”

Doctor and board-certified anesthesiologist Jason Burke calls his fledgling business a medical practice on wheels, analogous to a physician with an RV offering X-rays, MRIs or mammograms, a mobile dentist, or a blood bank bus set up in an office building parking lot.

The idea, Burke said, is to bring relief to tourists with stomach-churning wooziness, headaches and body pains — symptoms that could ruin an entire day in Sin City.

“Many people come to Las Vegas with the intent to drink and have a good time,” Burke said as he moved between patients seated on plush benches in the retrofitted, full-sized tour bus. The casino scenery passing outside the windows, the flat-screen TVs, the ceiling mirror and the aide in the suggestive nurse outfit? Hey, it’s Vegas.

“I don’t think that Hangover Heaven is promoting drinking. I’m not eliminating hangovers,” Burke told The Associated Press. “The goal of the business is to get people back to their vacation. I’m decreasing the length of time they’re going to be hung over.”

Burke said his goal is to arrive within an hour at the caller’s hotel.

Once on the bus, treatment can take less than an hour for a $90 basic IV of saline solution, B vitamins and vitamin C. A premium package, $150, includes two bags. For an extra fee, Burke will bring treatment to a tourist’s hotel room.

Burke administers the prescription anti-inflammatory Ketorolac or Toradol for pain and Zofran, also known as Ondansetron, for nausea. Acid heartburn can be treated with over-the-counter ranitidine. Patients get a shot of the anesthetic Lidocaine to numb the skin before the IV needle is inserted.

“For the most part, it sounds safe,” said Dr. Daliah Wachs, a family practice physician and national satellite radio medical talk show host based in Las Vegas. “But this is kind of gutsy. He’s taking a risk.”

A patient could have an allergic reaction, Wachs said, or fail to fully report their medical history. For people with pre-existing conditions, Toradol can affect the kidneys, she said, and Zofran can trigger abnormal heart rhythm. There could also be complications for people with esophageal or stomach ailments from chronic alcohol abuse.

Still, Wachs said, emergency room physicians and clinic doctors have for decades provided hangover sufferers with IV drip “banana bags” — so named for their yellow color.

“I think many doctors are kicking themselves because they didn’t think of this first,” she added.

Burke compared Toradol with over-the-counter Ibuprofen, and said that in 14 years as an anesthesiologist he had never seen a patient experience heart arrhythmia from Zofran. He said he uses small doses of the drugs.

“This is a professional medical practice. We take a medical history,” he said. “I’m not a cowboy. I’m not going to grab someone off the street…without knowing their medical history. If they do have something that might be complicated, I’ll refer them to an emergency room or tailor their treatment to avoid anything that might cause problems.”

Prospective customers are advised they shouldn’t drink alcohol for two hours before treatment, and can’t arrive drunk. Walk-ups are turned away. Pregnant females are also declined. “If they are pregnant … they should not be drinking to excess in the first place,” Burke declares in his business plan

In a medical emergency, Burke said he is capable and qualified to use hospital-style “crash cart” equipment on the bus, including an automatic defibrillator, laryngoscope, pulse, blood pressure and oxygen meters, and emergency medications.

Steve Sisolak, a member of the Clark County Commission who helped nix a 2009 venture featuring a rolling “stripper mobile” with scantily clad women gyrating on poles, said he could see no reason to oppose Burke’s Hangover Heaven bus.

“Give him credit for creativity and entrepreneurship,” Sisolak said. “But you have to trust that he knows what he’s doing.”

Word of mouth was already spreading. Passenger Cameron Byrd, a tourist from Raleigh, N.C., in Vegas for his 32nd birthday, marveled at his feeling of recovery.

“My friend just texted me and said, ‘I feel like death,’” Byrd said, before responding with a solution: “We’re on the hangover helper bus.”

CHICAGO (AP) — New research gives clear proof that weight-loss surgery can reverse and possibly cure diabetes, and doctors say the operation should be offered sooner to more people with the disease — not just as a last resort.

The two studies, released on Monday, are the first to compare stomach-reducing operations to medicines alone for “diabesity” — Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity. Millions of Americans have this and can’t make enough insulin or use what they do make to process sugar from food.

Both studies found that surgery helped far more patients achieve normal blood-sugar levels than medicines alone did.

The results were dramatic: Some people were able to stop taking insulin as soon as three days after their operations. Cholesterol and other heart risk factors also greatly improved.

Doctors don’t like to say “cure” because they can’t promise a disease will never come back. But in one study, most surgery patients were able to stop all diabetes drugs and have their disease stay in remission for at least two years. None of those treated with medicines alone could do that.

“It is a major advance,” said Dr. John Buse of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a leading diabetes expert who had no role in the studies. Buse said he often recommends surgery to patients who are obese and can’t control their blood-sugar through medications, but many are leery of it. “This evidence will help convince them that this really is an important therapy to at least consider,” he said.

There were signs that the surgery itself — not just weight loss — helps reverse diabetes. Food makes the gut produce hormones to spur insulin, so trimming away part of it surgically may affect those hormones, doctors believe.

Weight-loss surgery “has proven to be a very appropriate and excellent treatment for diabetes,” said one study co-leader, Dr. Francesco Rubino, chief of diabetes surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “The most proper name for the surgery would be diabetes surgery.”

The studies were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, and the larger one was presented Monday at an American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago.

More than a third of American adults are obese, and more than 8 percent have diabetes, a major cause of heart disease, strokes and kidney failure. Between 5 million and 10 million are like the people in these studies, with both problems.

For a century, doctors have been treating diabetes with pills and insulin, and encouraging weight loss and exercise with limited success. Few very obese people can drop enough pounds without surgery, and many of the medicines used to treat diabetes can cause weight gain, making things worse.

Surgery offers hope for a long-term fix. It costs $15,000 to $25,000, and Medicare covers it for very obese people with diabetes. Gastric bypass is the most common type: Through “keyhole” surgery, doctors reduce the stomach to a small pouch and reconnect it to the small intestine.

One previous study tested stomach banding, a less drastic and reversible procedure for limiting the size of the stomach. This technique lowered blood sugar, but those patients had mild diabetes. The new studies tested permanent weight-loss surgery in people with longtime, severe diabetes.

At the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Philip Schauer studied 150 people given one of two types of surgery plus standard medicines or a third group given medicines alone. Their A1c levels — the key blood-sugar measure — were over 9 on average at the start. A healthy A1c is 6 or below.

One year after treatment began, only 12 percent of those treated with medicines alone were at that healthy level, versus 42 percent and 37 percent of the two groups given surgery.

Use of medicines for high cholesterol and other heart risks dropped among those in the surgery groups but rose in the group on medicines alone.

“Every single one of the bypass patients who got to 6 or less got there without the need for any diabetes medicines. Almost half of them were on insulin at the start. That’s pretty amazing,” said a study co-leader, Dr. Steven Nissen, the Cleveland Clinic’s cardiovascular chief.

An obesity surgery equipment company sponsored the study, and some of the researchers are paid consultants; the federal government also contributed grant support.

The second study was led by Dr. Geltrude Mingrone at the Catholic University in Rome, with Rubino from New York. It involved 60 patients given one of two types of surgery or medicines alone. The researchers set as their goal an A1c under 6.5 — the level at which someone is considered to have diabetes.

Two years later, 95 percent and 75 percent of the two surgery groups achieved and maintained the target blood-sugar levels without any diabetes drugs. None of those in the medicine-alone group did.

There were no deaths from surgery and only a few complications. Four patients in the Cleveland study needed second surgeries, and two in the Italian study needed hernia operations. Doctors note that uncontrolled diabetes has complications, too — many patients wind up on dialysis when their kidneys fail, and some need transplants.

An adult who has a body mass index (a calculation based on height and weight) of 30 or more is considered obese. That’s 203 pounds or more for a 5-foot-9 man, for example.

The government recently lowered the criteria for use of gastric bands from a BMI of 35 down to 30 in diabetics or people with heart disease, opening the way for wider use of this and other procedures for obesity.

Dr. Alvin Powers, director of the Vanderbilt University diabetes center, said the results are very encouraging for people like those in these studies — very obese, with diabetes that can’t be controlled through less drastic means.

“We still don’t know the long-term outcomes of these surgeries” and whether the benefits will last for more than a few years, he said.

Others were more positive.

The studies “are likely to have a major effect on future diabetes treatment,” two diabetes experts from Australia, Dr. Paul Zimmet and George Alberti, wrote in an editorial in the medical journal. Surgery “should not be seen as a last resort” and should be considered earlier in treating obese people with diabetes, they wrote.

Jon Diat is a success story. Diat, 50, who works at Citigroup and lives in New York, had been piling on pounds and pills for cholesterol and high blood pressure. After he needed an artery-opening procedure he was diagnosed with diabetes, but medicines for that failed to keep his disease under control and worsened his obesity.

“I was maxed out on the medications. It was very grim,” he said. Two years ago, he had weight-loss surgery from Rubino.

“They told me, ‘You’re going to see rapid results,’ but it was amazing. I literally lost 70 pounds in the first three months,” he said. “I was off insulin within less than 72 hours of surgery. I am in complete, total remission of diabetes. My blood sugars are normal.”

Now he eats right, plays tennis and hockey, walks the two miles home from work and takes 12 flights of stairs to his apartment.

“I look at this as a second chance at life,” he said. “It’s been liberating.”

Tamikka McCray, 39, who also lives in New York and works for the city’s Human Resources Administration, also had success from her surgery a year and a half ago. When she left the hospital, her diabetes had disappeared before any major weight loss had a chance to occur.

“That was the crazy part,” she said. “I didn’t understand that when they came in and they checked it. My sugars were normal.” She added: “I left the hospital with no medication. And I haven’t been on anything since.”

___

AP video journalist Ted Shaffrey in New York contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Surgery explainer: http://win.niddk.nih.gov/publications/gastric.htm(hash)SurgAdult

Body Mass Index calculator: http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/bminojs.htm

Heart meeting: www.cardiosource.org

New England Journal: www.nejm.org