#1870 - Max Lugavere

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. What's up, Max, how are you?

Max Lugavere (0:13)

What up, thanks for having me. Same.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I've enjoyed your content online, so it's excited to meet you in person.

Max Lugavere (0:19)

Thank you, I'm glad to hear that.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

So you were telling me before we got rolling, I said save it, let's just talk about it. This Alzheimer's thing that you're doing, what are you doing?

Max Lugavere (0:27)

Yeah, so I've been deeply immersed in the Alzheimer's dementia prevention world for the past almost decade at this point. I'm not a, just to lay it out upfront, I'm not a medical doctor, I didn't take the academic route.

I started college on a pre-med track, but what ended up happening was I ended up going into journalism straight out of college and I ended up working for a TV network in the US that was backed by Al Gore back in the day. And so I got to hone my storytelling chops there, but I had always been really passionate about health, nutrition, medicine, things like that. But in 2011, my mother started to display the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which is a rare form of dementia.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Robin Williams had that. Yeah.

Max Lugavere (1:13)

Terrible condition. It's described as feeling like you have both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time, and certainly that's what I observed in my mom. And so, when she started to display those symptoms, it had taken me and my family completely off guard. I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition.

My mom certainly wasn't old at the time. She was 58 She was still a spirited, youthful woman in middle age. She had all the pigments in her hair. And for me, I was in between jobs, and I really had the opportunity, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to go with her to different doctor's appointments. And I grew up in New York City, so we had access to cathedrals, to medical advice and examination. And in every instance, we were met with what I've come to call diagnose and adios. Basically, a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests on my mom, scribble down a few notes on a prescription pad and send us on our way. But we had to ultimately take a trip to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which is known for taking on really complex medical cases. They build a team around the patient. And it was there that for the first time, my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. She was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It wasn't until a few years later that she actually received the Lewy body dementia diagnosis. But at that point, I started to dive into the research because I had been trained as a journalist, which you're not trained as rigorously as a PhD scientist, but you're kind of taught similarly to investigate things, to maintain skepticism, to ask questions.

And I started to look into the literature and just generally get a sense of what it was that my mom had been diagnosed with, what this entailed.

And I realized that in most cases, dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom, 10, 20, 30 years even, by some estimates. And so for me, this became something really important to explore as a potentially preventable condition, because I realized for the first time that I had a risk factor, that my mom was my risk factor, essentially. I hadn't even yet looked into my genes at that point. But so I started looking into it and I came across all of these fascinating insights, which we can talk about. But I decided at that point that to sort of do what I could to help move the needle with this condition, that I would use my skills, which at the time were filmmaking, because I had just come off, I was producing content for TV and I was on camera, I was a communicator as well. And so I decided to do a documentary on the topic of dementia prevention, the first ever documentary on dementia as a potentially preventable condition.

We've all seen dementia documentaries on HBO and networks like that, and they always push this very doom and gloom mentality about the condition, which I understand it is a very difficult condition. It's America's most feared condition after all.

And this is a condition that 90% of what we know about Alzheimer's disease in particular, which is just one form of dementia, has been discovered only in the past 15 years. So it's a very rapidly evolving field of science. But I felt like if we know that this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms, then to me what that is, that's a very empowering insight. That means that we have agency to change our cognitive destiny. So I started shooting with my mom, which was very hard to do, because the person who I love most in the world, I was watching decline right in front of the camera. But also I decided to exploit my media credentials at the time to then talk to researchers and scientists around the world. And I was doing my own research in the primary literature as well. But I decided to go to these labs and clinics where they're really ushering in dementia as a potentially preventable condition. And I actually signed myself up to become a study subject in one actually at Weill Cornell in New York. And I actually became, ultimately I became a collaborator with the principal investigator there, who's become my mentor over the years, Richard Isaacson.