The story behind the practice
I lost my dad young, to a rare and aggressive form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia. FTD is not the dementia most people picture. It tends to strike decades earlier than Alzheimer's — often between 45 and 65 — and it frequently comes for personality, behavior, judgment, and language before it ever touches memory. Because of that, it is regularly mistaken for burnout, a midlife crisis, or a psychiatric illness. Families often spend years chasing an answer.
By the time we had a name for what was happening, there was nothing left to do but watch. That experience reshaped how I think about medicine. I had spent my career in emergency medicine, urgent care, family medicine, and psychiatry — all of it downstream, all of it reactive. We are very good at responding to disease once it announces itself. We are far less organized about the twenty years before that, when the signal is still quiet and still changeable.
I can't change what happened to my dad. What I can do is refuse to wait until someone is symptomatic to start paying attention.
MacKenzie Froehle, PA-C · Co-founder
Thrive Longevity is the practice my husband Cameron and I built out of that. We are honest about what prevention can and cannot promise — there is still no cure for FTD, and we don't sell one. What we can do is measure early, measure thoroughly, act on what we find, and keep measuring. Cognitive, metabolic, cardiovascular, and hormonal health are trackable long before they become a diagnosis. Most people are simply never offered that level of testing, and when they are, it is priced as a luxury.
