Not quite a decade ago, when Professor of Neuroscience Diane Lipscombe P’14 began to look into the neurological roots of pain, she briefly thought that she must be overlooking seminal swaths of literature. “It’s a really difficult problem, and so pervasive,” she says. “You think ‘Oh, we must know a lot about pain, I must not be reading the right things, this must already be known …’ but there are, in fact, fundamental aspects of pain that are unknown.”

The federal insurer faces particularly high payments for hospitalization during the period between when patients are first diagnosed and when they enter long-term care, according to a novel analysis of Alzheimer's disease-related Medicare expenditures. Judith Bentkover, adjunct professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University, and colleagues conducted the study.