A Las Vegas medical center dedicated to brain health is making improvements in treatment options, research and education for Alzheimer's disease and related conditions in the Silver State.
While initially focused on Alzheimer's disease, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health has since broadened its scope to include other forms of dementia, along with movement disorders such as Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease and neuroimmunological disorders like multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Dylan Wint, director at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, said patients come to the center from within Nevada and across the country. Telemedicine has advanced the center's reach around the state.
"Within Nevada, if they're willing to do telemedicine appointments, we can do those within Nevada," Wint said. "For our memory disorders, most of the time a telemedicine appointment is fine, even for a new patient."
For movement disorders and multiple sclerosis programs, those patients may need to be seen in the office.
Wint said that he has patients in Northern Nevada. When things come up like blood tests, those can be ordered from a distance, he said.
"More than 16,000 telemedicine appointments have been conducted, connecting Nevadans across the state — particularly those who have difficulties with mobility, transportation, time away from work or travel from a rural area — with specialized neurological care," he said.
Ruvo and the early years of the center
The center's path forward began with a private gathering in Las Vegas at Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant in 1995, where a few dozen people had gathered to pay tribute to longtime Las Vegas restaurateur Lou Ruvo, who died the previous year from Alzheimer's disease.
John Paul DeJoria, a founder of Paul Mitchell hair products, happened to be at Spago that night for another event, and gave a check for $5,000 to go toward battling Alzheimer's disease.
Ruvo's son, Larry, said he "never envisioned my dad's memorial dinner would become a fundraising event." But after the announcement of DeJoria's contribution, more attendees gave money, $35,000 by the end of the evening. Another charity dinner was held the next year, he said.
Larry Ruvo made his mark in philanthropy and has been a longtime leader in the wholesale liquor and wine industry in Nevada. He and his wife Camille co-founded Keep Memory Alive, a nonprofit dedicated to raising funds for brain health research and care. It has played a crucial role in building and sustaining the center.
The experiences Ruvo had in getting a diagnosis for his father would help shape his moves to create the center.
Ruvo said the road to a diagnosis for his father was bumpy, with several misdiagnoses made by doctors in the Las Vegas area.
His father was eventually diagnosed after seeing a neurologist in California: "Our journey finally took us to San Diego, culminating in an experience in noted neurologist Dr. Leon Thal’s waiting room that forever changed my vision for Nevadans facing Alzheimer’s disease," Ruvo said.
"Others waiting to see Dr. Thal were clearly in the later stages of Alzheimer’s," he said. "My dad looked at me and said, ‘Is this where I’m headed?’ I told him Dr. Thal saw patients for myriad diseases and no, that’s not what he would be diagnosed with."
But Lou Ruvo was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Ruvo said, "I knew I wanted to make a difference in the lives of my family and friends so no one would have to sit in a waiting room and see their future in patients further along the journey of neurological diseases. I set off on a journey that was powered by love but supported by little hope in the near-term."
Today, the center has seen nearly 300,000 visits, Ruvo said.
Nevada advancements
The Center for Brain Health has been a site for major drug trials across the spectrum of disorders it treats, focusing on late-phase clinical trials. This means that the center doesn't look to do studies to test how safe a drug is but "how well a safe medicine works to treat a condition," Wint said.
With these trials, patients can be put on cutting-edge medication years prior to their release to the public. This was the case with two Alzheimer's drugs released for disease modification in recent years that were made available to patients in clinical trials at the center.
According to Wint, noting the Alzheimer's drugs in the center's trials, some of these medications can run into the tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Of the last two drugs released to treat Alzheimer's, the first one had an initial cost of $50,000 a year, he said.
"Patients who were in the trial got it while they were in the trial, but when the trial was completed, patients who were on the drug were able to continue to get the drug for free," he said. "It also creates access across all the diseases that we treat."
One of the medications available in a clinical trial was lecanemab, which was fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023 to treat early stages of Alzheimer's disease, the first drug to gain such an approval in over 20 years at that time. Wint described it as a "manufactured antibody that removes amyloid protein, which is associated with Alzheimer's, from the brain," helping to slow cognitive decline. Another drug, donanemab, was approved by the FDA in July.
The center has also seen drugs for other conditions go to market as well.
According to Wint, five drugs given to patients in clinical trials to treat MS have gone to market.
"Again, that means that patients that we were taking care of had an opportunity to be involved with those trials and get those drugs before they came to market and also that our clinicians once those drugs did come to market were extremely familiar with them," he said.
Another aspect the center focuses on is offering aid to caregivers.
"Caregivers are a major motivation behind our focus on fundraising: We want to continue to provide free educational, therapeutic and support programs daily. Most are online and can be accessed from anywhere in the state; some are in person," Ruvo said.
Ruvo said the center's focus on caregivers stems from his mother Angie's experience caring for his father without any support services available in Las Vegas at the time.
Ruvo, with his wife Camille, honored his mother's legacy in 2019 by funding the Angie Ruvo Endowed Caregiving Chair, held by health psychologist Lucille Carriere, Ph.D.
"This first-of-its-kind position is aimed at improving outcomes for unpaid family caregivers through developing and delivering evidence-based programming," Ruvo said.
This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: Nevada medical center pioneers brain health research, treatment
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