A brain health medical center in Las Vegas is improving treatment options, research and education on Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions in the Silver State.
While the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health initially focused on Alzheimer’s disease, it has since expanded its scope to include other forms of dementia and now includes movement disorders such as Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, as well as neuroimmunological diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Dylan Wint, director of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, said patients come to the center from Nevada and across the country, and telemedicine has expanded the center’s reach across the state.
“If Nevada is willing to do telemedicine appointments, we can do them in Nevada,” Wint said. “With our memory impairments, a telemedicine appointment is usually OK, even for a new patient.”
Movement disorder and multiple sclerosis programs may require an office visit for these patients.
Wint said he has patients in Northern Nevada. If things like blood tests are needed, those can be ordered remotely, he said.
“More than 16,000 telehealth appointments have been conducted to provide specialized neurological care to Nevadans across the state, particularly those who have mobility or transportation issues, are temporarily unable to work, or are traveling from rural areas,” he said.
Ruvo and the early years of the center
The center’s journey began in 1995 with a private event at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant in Las Vegas, where several dozen people gathered to pay their respects to longtime Las Vegas restaurant owner Lou Ruvo, who had died of Alzheimer’s the previous year.
John Paul DeJoria, founder of Paul Mitchell hair care products, happened to be at Spago that evening for another event and presented a check for $5,000 to help fight Alzheimer’s disease.
Ruvo’s son, Larry, said he “never imagined that the memorial dinner for my father would become a fundraiser.” But after DeJoria’s donation was announced, more guests contributed money, and by the end of the evening, the total was $35,000. Another fundraiser was held the next year, he said.
Larry Ruvo has made a name for himself in philanthropy and has long been a leader in Nevada’s wholesale spirits and wine industry. He and his wife, Camille, co-founded the nonprofit Keep Memory Alive, dedicated to raising funds for brain health research and treatment, and she has played a critical role in establishing and maintaining the center.
The experiences Ruvo had during his father’s diagnosis would help him in founding the center.
Ruvo said the road to diagnosing his father was bumpy, with doctors in the Las Vegas area making several misdiagnoses.
His father was finally diagnosed with the disease after a visit to a neurologist in California: “Our journey eventually took us to San Diego and culminated in an experience in the waiting room of renowned neurologist Dr. Leon Thal that forever changed my perspective on people in Nevada who suffer from Alzheimer’s,” said Ruvo.
“Others waiting to see Dr. Thal were clearly in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “My father looked at me and said, ‘Is that my goal?’ I told him that Dr. Thal treated patients with countless diseases and no, that was not the diagnosis he would be given.”
However, 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 that no one would have to sit in a waiting room and see their future in patients who already have a neurological disease. I set out on a journey fueled by love but accompanied by little hope for the near future.”
To date, the center has recorded nearly 300,000 visits, Ruvo said.
Progress in Nevada
The Center for Brain Health is a site for large drug trials for all the conditions it treats, with a focus on late-stage clinical trials. That means the center doesn’t conduct trials to test how safe a drug is, but rather “how well a safe drug works in treating a disease,” Wint said.
These trials allow patients to receive cutting-edge drugs years before they are launched on the market. This was the case with two Alzheimer’s drugs that were launched in recent years to modify the disease and were made available to patients in clinical trials at the center.
Wint points out that the cost of some of the Alzheimer’s drugs being tested at the center can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Of the last two drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, the first had an acquisition cost of $50,000 a year, he said.
“Patients who participated in the trial received the drug during the trial, but when the trial was completed, patients who were taking the drug could continue to receive it for free,” he said. “It also creates access for all the diseases we treat.”
One of the drugs 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. At the time, it was the first drug to receive such approval in over 20 years. Wint described it as a “man-made antibody that removes the amyloid protein 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 supported the market launch of drugs for other diseases.
According to Wint, five drugs have come onto the market that have been given to patients in clinical trials to treat MS.
“This in turn means that the patients we care for had the opportunity to participate in these trials and receive these drugs before they came to market, and that our physicians were very familiar with the drugs when they came to market,” he said.
Another focus of the center is on supporting family caregivers.
“Caregivers are one of the main motivations for our focus on fundraising: we want to continue to offer free daily educational, therapeutic and support programs. Most of these are online and accessible from anywhere in the state; some are in person,” Ruvo said.
Ruvo said the center’s focus on caregivers stems from the experiences of his mother, Angie, who cared for his father without any support services available in Las Vegas at the time.
In 2019, Ruvo and his wife, Camille, honored his mother’s legacy by funding the Angie Ruvo Endowed Caregiving Chair, held by health psychologist Dr. Lucille Carriere.
“This unique position aims to improve outcomes for unpaid caregivers through the development and delivery of evidence-based programs,” Ruvo said.
