The recent passing of President Ford serves as another reminder that, even in death, presidents tend to dominate the American national consciousness, though that intense focus does not always translate into a financial windfall for a president’s favorite causes.

President Reagan’s death in 2004 drew attention to his decadelong struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. His family also named a research and treatment group, the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association, as a designated charity for gifts in his memory. However, Alzheimer’s researchers say they saw no discernable impact on the amount of money available for their work.

“I can certainly tell you it hasn’t had any ripple effect on federal funding, which, as you may know, is in a disastrous state,” the director of New York University’s Alzheimer’s program, Steven Ferris, said.

Spending by the National Institutes of Health on Alzheimer’s research peaked in 2003 at $658 million. Since Reagan died in 2004, the annual figure has varied only slightly. It is expected to total about $646 million in the current fiscal year.

Alzheimer’s researchers acknowledged that federal spending on their work rose sharply in the 1990s and during the early years of this decade. Part of the increase tracked with a bipartisan consensus to double the budget for the National Institutes of Health. In the last few years, though, the increases evaporated.

Mr. Ferris said he believes that federal health research is being squeezed by outlays for the Iraq War. “This whole ‘guns-and-butter’ thing definitely doesn’t benefit butter,” he said.

The Alzheimer’s Association reported $57 million in gifts in fiscal year 2004, which ended a few weeks after Reagan’s death. That was down from $58.6 million in the previous year.

“Money came in, but it was not a huge surge,” the group’s director at the time, Sheldon Goldberg, told The New York Sun. “I don’t think it was enormous.” Mr. Goldberg said the largest gift he recalled was $1 million from the company that sponsored one of Reagan’s most famous television series, “General Electric Theater.”

A former director of the Jewish Home and Hospital of New York, Mr. Goldberg credited Reagan for the boost in public awareness that followed his public letter disclosing his diagnosis with the disease in 1994. “It had a humongous impact on the national psyche,” he said. “It literally brought Alzheimer’s into the public consciousness.”

A researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, Jeffrey Cummings, called the 1994 Reagan letter “a milestone” but said that by the time of the former president’s death, press attention was focused on the politically charged issue of Nancy Reagan’s support for stem-cell research. “That may have a relation to Alzheimer’s disease, but it is quite a bit broader,” Mr. Cummings said.

A former White House aide who ran Reagan’s office before his death, Joanne Drake, said she had no figures on donations prompted by his passing, though she said was told of increased giving to the national Alzheimer’s Association and a local chapter in Santa Barbara, Calif. Ms. Drake said donors may or may not have mentioned Reagan when giving, making the gifts difficult to track. Mrs. Reagan’s support for stem-cell research has also spurred donations to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Ms. Drake said.

When Reagan died, his family named three charities to receive donations in his memory, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, and his alma mater, Eureka College in Illinois.

Of these, the Reagan Foundation, which supports programs and exhibits at his library in Simi Valley, Calif., experienced the only recorded financial surge. In fiscal year 2004, the foundation took in $15.9 million, up from $9.4 million in the prior year.

The third charity touted by the Reagan family, Eureka College, saw a modest decline in giving, bringing in $1.4 million in the fiscal year of Reagan’s death, down from $1.6 million a year earlier.

“I would say the just general public monetary response wasn’t overwhelming,” the curator of the Illinois school’s Ronald Reagan Museum, Brian Sajko, said. “The biggest impact was probably publicity for the college, making more people aware of us and bringing more students here.”

A spokeswoman for the Alzheimer’s Association, Kate Meyer, said none of the group’s current officials was available to comment for this article. The group devoted about $21 million to research in 2006, according to its Web site. That’s a tiny fraction of the federal spending looking for treatments and a cure.

At present, federal funding for Alzheimer’s research is about the same as that for breast cancer, but far behind the $5.5 billion spent on general cancer research or the $2.9 billion spent on AIDS.

Mr. Ferris said the budgets seem to be allocated based on how many people currently have a disease or died from it in the past year, a method that does not account for the explosion in Alzheimer’s cases expected as the baby boomers age. “Technically, more people are suffering from heart disease and stroke than Alzheimer’s,” he said. “There’s going to be a doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of Alzheimer’s cases by the middle of the century, and to that extent, Alzheimer’s is looming the largest.”

Mr. Ferris said the financial impact of treatment and care for a growing number of Alzheimer’s patients will have a staggering impact on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. “If Alzheimer’s isn’t driving that future bankruptcy, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Researchers facing declining federal funding are turning to family foundations for help, while pharmaceutical companies looking for blockbuster drugs are driving a lot of the innovative research at the moment. Mr. Goldberg recently left his nonprofit post to work for a North Carolina firm researching Alzheimer’s drugs, Voyager Pharma. “We’re optimistic we may get someplace,” he said. “Everyone in the pharmaceutical industry is looking at this disease.”

Alzheimer’s treatments on the market now provide minimal benefit, but Dr. Cummings said three major trials of new drugs are due out soon. He said the most promising involve efforts to untangle the amyloid plaques that form in the brains of those affected with the disease. “2007 is an absolutely critical year for us,” he said.

Mr. Goldberg said the recent death of President Ford spurred another round of public questions about the mysteries of Alzheimer’s, noting that both leaders were 93 when they died. “People were asking, ‘Why did he remain so sharp and President Reagan develop Alzheimer’s?'”