It’s happening all around: Facebook and Twitter accounts of both regular people and high-profile individuals are turning purple.

It’s because June is Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month. The fight is intensifying worldwide against this devastating brain degenerative condition leaving many elderly people unable to recall their fondest memories or even recognize the faces of loved ones.

In Michigan for example, the state is trying to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease, with Gov. Rick Snyder’s official website and social media accounts turning purple to bring awareness to Alzheimer’s.

A total of 5.3 million people in the United States alone have been diagnosed with the disease. By spreading awareness, officials hope to raise more funds to fight the debilitating illness.

There are signs of hope. As we reported recently, a study released by the Buck Institute used a complex formula that included everything from diet changes to new exercise habits and vitamin regimens and was able to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s in 10 patients — far from a victory against the disease, but a step in the right direction and a hopeful sign of progress.

In the Buck Institute study, all of the patients “had either well-defined mild cognitive impairment (MCI), subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) or had been diagnosed with Azheimer’s disease before beginning the program,” said author Dale Bredesen, MD, a professor at the Buck Institute and professor at the Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at UCLA, who said that patients were able to return to work they had to discontinue because of their struggles. “Follow up testing showed some of the patients going from abnormal to normal.”

Bredesen was encouraged by the results, but he said more research will be needed.

“The magnitude of improvement in these ten patients is unprecedented, providing additional objective evidence that this programmatic approach to cognitive decline is highly effective,” Bredesen said. “Even though we see the far-reaching implications of this success, we also realize that this is a very small study that needs to be replicated in larger numbers at various sites.”

Plans for additional studies are ongoing.