A Nevada-based clinic is working to tackle answers to why more women than men are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Women make up about two-thirds of the more than 7 million Americans currently living with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the American Hospital Association.

That disproportionate impact — which age may partly explain — has drawn increasing attention in recent years, including five years of dedicated research and prevention efforts at the Las Vegas-based Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention and Research Center (WAM).

Dr. Dylan Wint, director at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, where WAM is located, said women’s longer life expectancy contributes to the numbers — but doesn’t fully explain them.

“Even at the same age (as men), women are still more likely to have it,” he said.

WAM was launched in 2020 through a partnership between the Cleveland Clinic and WAM, the organization founded by journalist and advocate Maria Shriver.

Her decades of work helped reframe Alzheimer’s as a critical women’s health issue, laying the foundation for the clinic’s prevention-focused model.

Since its opening, the center has seen nearly 500 patients from more than 30 states.

How Maria Shriver’s advocacy helped shape a Nevada clinic

Shriver’s advocacy began in 2003, when her father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“At the time, few people spoke about Alzheimer’s openly,” she told the RGJ. “It felt like a diagnosis shrouded in shame.”

She began working to bring the disease out of the shadows.

Shriver said she quickly noticed how many women were affected by the disease — something most experts attributed to age.

“We know that age is the number one risk factor for Alzheimer’s,” she said, “but I had a sense there was another piece to this story.”

After partnering with the Alzheimer’s Association, Shriver helped publish The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Takes on Alzheimer’s in 2010, “which helped rewrite the narrative around Alzheimer’s as a women’s issue by stating definitively and plainly that something beyond age was responsible for women being twice as likely as men to develop the disease.”

That message became the foundation for the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, the nonprofit Shriver founded to advance women-centered research, education and prevention.

Shriver said she was already close with Larry and Camille Ruvo, whose own family had been affected by Alzheimer’s.

She supported their efforts to build the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and later partnered with them through WAM’s research grant program, which funds studies on how women’s brains differ from men’s.

As knowledge around the potential for prevention grew, Shriver proposed opening a women-focused Alzheimer’s prevention clinic — an idea the Ruvos quickly embraced.

In 2020, WAM partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to launch the nation’s first Alzheimer’s prevention clinic focused on women, housed inside the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.

What the science says about women’s risk

Doctors say some possible reasons women are more likely than men to develop Alzheimer’s include inflammation and hormonal changes.

“Some of those suspicions are that women may have different forms of some of the proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease, such as tau protein, which is very toxic to the brain and is part of the Alzheimer’s disease,” said Wint. “It may be easier for women’s tau protein to become deformed or to spread.”

Women also tend to have more autoimmune and inflammatory conditions than men, he said, which may be a factor.

“Lupus, inflammatory thyroid diseases, conditions like that that affect women at a higher rate than men, may set out a tendency toward inflammation that drives more brain changes.”

Wint said some studies have tried to control for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. “But even controlling for that doesn’t fully explain it either,” he said.

The clinic focuses on prevention — helping women reduce risk through changes in things like sleep, diet, exercise, alcohol use and other things.

“It’s primarily preventative,” Wint said. “It’s looking at known lifestyle factors that increase risk and then trying to avoid those.”

More than 60% of WAM’s patients join research studies at the clinic, he said.

From Alzheimer’s to the future of women’s health

Shriver said her work around Alzheimer’s revealed deeper gaps in women’s health research overall.

“Women’s health has been a field of study traditionally underfunded, under-researched, and hence, not at all understood,” she said.

As early WAM studies explored factors like estrogen, the microbiome, and stress, Shriver was struck by how few had focused on women at all — let alone on their brain health. That expanded her mission.

In 2024, she partnered with former President Joe Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden to launch the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. As she felt then, Shriver hopes that Congress and the National Institute of Health ramp up funding for women’s health research.

“We will all benefit from understanding why women are living with so many serious, chronic conditions that impact not just the health of women and their families, but also our national economy,” she said.

Through its research grant program, WAM has helped uncover how estrogen loss during perimenopause and menopause may raise the risk for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, Shriver said.

“We’ve been on the cutting edge of the larger menopause discussion, which has helped spark a real movement around progress in menopause treatments.”

Shriver said she’s applied the clinic’s findings in her own life — avoiding processed foods and sugar, prioritizing sleep and exercising regularly, along with maintaining her spiritual, intellectual and social health.

“These are practices that science tells us today are good not just for our brains, but for our overall health,” she said. “I try to abide by them so I can avoid my father’s fate — which I have every intention of doing.”