The annual Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala fundraising event for the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Downtown Las Vegas came back strong last month, holding its first event since October 2021.

That gala moved from its traditional venue at MGM Grand Garden Arena to Resorts World, partially to honor Genting Group CEO KT Lim for bringing the new Strip resort to life, and partially because the Grand Garden wasn’t available while live entertainment was relaunching in Las Vegas during the pandemic.

The 26th gala, held February 18 and attended by more than 1,500 guests, returned to MGM Grand, bolstered by appearances and performances from a long list of entertainers including Sammy Hagar, Paula Abdul, Alice Cooper, John Mayer, Michael McDonald and Nikki Glaser. The evening generated millions of dollars for the Ruvo Center, which provides high-quality care, essential resources and education, and no-cost support to patients and caregivers battling Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

“Without Power of Love, we lose a lot of money, and we need those fundraising efforts from the people of Las Vegas and the people that use the center to support us, to buy a ticket, to make a donation, anything they can do,” Larry Ruvo, Keep Memory Alive co-founder and vice chair, said before the event.

Journalist and author Maria Shriver was in attendance, too, but she was there for a different reason than the other celebrities. Considered one of the world’s leading Alzheimer’s advocates—in 2017, the Alzheimer’s Association awarded her with its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award—Shriver helped conceive and launch the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement (WAM) Prevention Center at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

Shriver first visited the Ruvo Center in 2010, when it was founded by Ruvo in memory of his father, Lou, who died from the disease, as did Shriver’s father, diplomat and politician Sargent Shriver.

Ruvo said “it was her idea” to develop the one-of-a-kind, three-year pilot program specific to women for Alzheimer’s disease prevention, launched in Las Vegas on June 18, 2020.

“I’ve been friends with Larry and Camille Ruvo for years,” Shriver tells the Weekly. “From the moment the Ruvos committed to building the beautiful state-of-the-art Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, I told them I was in—and that I would do whatever I could to help watch the center grow, from fundraising to talking about their important work on my many platforms as a journalist. I was there for the first fundraising gala and have come back over the years whenever I can.”

Alzheimer’s disease impacts women disproportionately. According to Cleveland Clinic statistics, two-thirds of the 6.5 million Americans currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s are women (4.3 million), and more than half of all caregivers for people with Alzheimer’s are women.

“Yet, the current research suggests that up to 40% of Alzheimer’s cases could have been prevented had we known decades ago about the lifestyle factors that contribute to Alzheimer’s risk, such as smoking, social isolation, high blood pressure, etc.,” says Jessica Caldwell, director of the WAM Prevention Center. “The goal is to give women an idea of how to change their behaviors now, so that they can change the future of their brain health.”

Shriver says her advocacy work has been focused on incentivizing policy makers and health care providers to help answer the question of why two out of three cases of Alzheimer’s develop in women, and why women of color are at even higher risk.

“As we all watched the painfully slow progress taking place around finding a cure or therapies for Alzheimer’s, we were simultaneously researching and following carefully the growing science around the power of prevention,” she says. “The first Alzheimer’s prevention center designed just for women ... was [because of] the overnight demand and success of this clinic; that led to discussions with the larger Cleveland Clinic enterprise to see if we can grow what’s happening in Las Vegas.”

The WAM Center, designed for women 30-60 with known or suspected family history for Alzheimer’s disease, combines the latest science on prevention with a woman’s medical history, biological risks, habits, mood and memory to create a custom, sustainable plan for lifestyle modifications that can reduce the risk of disease. And it’s staffed by women who understand the unique factors that impact women—like menopause—and those that can affect women’s brains more than men’s—like diabetes.

“Having specific care for women really helps us to help those people who have the disease most often,” Caldwell says. “[And] it’s allowing women the comfort to know that they are coming into a clinic that is made for them and designed with the types of stresses and struggles women might face in mind,”

Last year, WAM officially merged with the Cleveland Clinic, Caldwell explains, which will allow the center to expand prevention care in Las Vegas and grow the collaboration at the clinic’s main campus in Cleveland, “to talk about how we might bring aspects of our prevention care there.”

“Now that WAM is a part of Cleveland Clinic, we will be able to pair that power with the medical expertise and robust research network of Cleveland Clinic to further address and reduce women’s risk for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases,” Caldwell says.

Though the WAM Center is a clinic first—a billable medical appointment with costs determined by a woman’s insurance plan—there are a number of active research opportunities in which patients can participate. There’s a registry where they can enroll their clinical data to help doctors and researchers better understand which prevention methods works best, along with a large National Institutes of Health (NIH) study to learn more about Alzheimer’s disease risk.

“It’s been an honor to work with the many highly trained researchers and doctors at Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, especially watching director Jessica Caldwell grow the program to the point where we are bursting out of our seams in Las Vegas,” Shriver says.

For more information, visit WomenPreventAlz.org.