Lauren Miller Rogen and Richard Isaacson, M.D.: Alzheimer's disease prevention—patient and doctor perspectives

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guests this week are Lauren Miller Rogen and Richard Isaacson. Lauren is an actress, screenwriter, director, but also a friend and patient. She's the co-founder of Hilarity for Charity, or HFC, a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to care for the families facing the disease of Alzheimer's disease, educate them about living a healthy brain life, and activate the next generation of Alzheimer's advocates. Richard Isaacson should be a familiar name for some of you as he was a guest on a previous episode of The Drive in late 2018 when we did a deep dive into Alzheimer's disease. Many of you have requested follow-up podcasts on this topic. Among them, this is one. Richard serves as the director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell, New York-Presbyterian Hospital and is an assistant dean at the office of the faculty of Weill Cornell of Medicine. I've known Lauren for a couple of years. We actually met through Richard and the three of us been talking about doing this podcast for about a year. In fact, we were going to do it last fall and then we put it off until the spring and then COVID got in the way. So this one's been a long time coming. My intuition was that being able to talk about Alzheimer's disease with Richard and Lauren simultaneously would be a beautiful way to discuss the human tragedy of the disease and also to talk about the science of prevention and the pathology of the disease. And honestly, by the end of this discussion, I felt we had really achieved that. I think Lauren's story is both heartbreaking and uplifting for reasons that will become clear as you listen to this. In this episode, we talk about her journey with her family history, what led her to Richard, and ultimately what really changed the course of her life with respect to how she treats prevention.
We talk a lot about what preventative measures look like today and how we look at the evolving body of literature to figure out how to modify risk. So if you have even a slight interest in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, I think you're gonna find this episode both touching and enlightening. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lauren Miller Rogan and Richard Isaacson.
Lauren and Richard, what a privilege to be sort of sitting down with you guys right now. We have been kicking around the idea of doing this for about a year now. COVID kind of got in our way. We were gonna do this obviously in person last year.
So while it's long overdue, I think this is just such an exciting opportunity both to kind of hear from you, Lauren, and kind of understand your personal journey, which you've basically taken on as your life's mission. And then obviously Richard, to have you back on and kind of, I don't know, I think bring people up to speed on what's happened in the last couple of years. So thanks both of you for making time today.

**Lauren Miller Rogen** (3:56)
You know, I feel like long time listener, first time guest. Very excited to be here.

**Richard Isaacson** (4:03)
Long time listener as well. Yeah, I hang on every word of most of the podcasts, especially, well, I had to listen to Tom Dayspring's podcast like 14 times. I'm still like need to listen to it on repeat, but.

**Peter Attia** (4:15)
Lauren, let's start with you. I mean, I want people to really get an understanding of your story. So I mean, when did you first become aware that there was something going on in your family that was robbing people of this precious thing called their mind?

**Lauren Miller Rogen** (4:33)
Unfortunately, Alzheimer's has been a part of my life as long as I can have my own memory. My grandfather, my mom's dad had Alzheimer's. My aunt has told me that it seems like he showed symptoms maybe in his late 50s or early 60s, but he was an interesting home, I think, from the time I was around eight or nine, maybe 10, and he passed away when I was 12 But when you're young that age, to me, his memory issues were almost funny, right? Like he would take his teeth out of the table and I thought that was hysterical and he would, you know, repeat things. And again, like when you're little, that's funny. And I didn't have any concept of the fact that the reason he had to go into a nursing home was because he was wandering and that my grandmother couldn't take care of him. And then after he passed away, my grandmother started showing signs of dementia and, you know, she was struggling to take care of herself and clearly wasn't eating. And, but, you know, I was in high school. So again, I wasn't really that aware of the situation and what was happening. But, you know, I was aware when they brought her from her home in South Florida up to where we were in Central Florida to put her in a facility, you know, and how she was curled over in the seat sleeping and not aware when I was showing her how I could drive for the first time and how she eventually stopped being able to walk or talk or feed herself. And my senior year, I would go visit her every Friday after school and, you know, a few other days during the week. But, you know, when she spent the last year of her life curled up in a bed, obviously not talking or being able to care for herself in any way at all.