Three decades into his career as a neurologist at Mayo Clinic, Dr. David Dodick decided to make a change.
As a neurologist, Dodick treated his patients after they’d experienced memory loss or had a stroke, he says. “Knowing that these diseases had been brewing for decades before the patient finally walked through the door, I felt like we could be doing so much more to optimize their health, to prevent them from having to come into the hospital with a stroke or complaining of memory loss,” says Dodick.
Seven years ago, Dodick started broadening his research focus to preventive medicine, which involves studying the origin of chronic diseases and tailoring health recommendations for patients to ideally delay the onset of diseases like dementia and cancer. “That got me interested in the whole field of longevity,” he says.
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Through studying a preventive approach to neurology, he learned that “to protect the brain, you have to protect the rest of the body,” he says. Pulling from his expertise on brain health, Dodick has authored 13 books since 1994, published numerous scientific papers and presented on cognitive longevity and dementia prevention at the 2025 Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting, a yearly longevity medicine conference.
