WASHINGTON – Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is seeking federal funding to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which affects 5.3 million Americans and costs Medicare more than $91 billion a year.

"I believe we are on the cusp of an historic breakthrough," Gingrich said in testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Aging last week. "The best and brightest in the scientific community share this belief."

Gingrich, founder of the Center for Health Transformation, joined Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD, on an Alzheimer's Study Group that issued a report urging federal funding to cure Alzheimer's by 2020.

The 52-page report provides what Gingrich called a roadmap to curing Alzheimer's. Two hundred researchers supporting an Alzheimer's prevention initiative backed the report and the need for a federal effort to provide "an appropriate, disciplined strategy" for finding cures.

There is currently no cure,  disease-modifying treatment or means of preventing the disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Every 70 seconds someone in America develops Alzheimer's disease, the association said, and by 2050, someone will develop Alzheimer's every 33 seconds.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention name Alzheimer's disease as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.

"Alzheimer's is a personal tragedy and a national crisis," Gingrich said.

"I believe we are at one of those rare moments in history where the right elements are coming together to make real change possible. We have progressed enough in our knowledge of the brain and how it works that, with the right resources and the right experts working together, we could see a fundamental breakthrough in Alzheimer's disease within the next decade," he said.