Alzheimer’s disease: how Hollywood comedy couple Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen make life easier for patients and carers
- HFC (Hilarity for Charity) was founded to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s after Lauren Miller Rogen’s mother was diagnosed with the disease
- The charity helps family carers in North America, who find it almost impossible to take time off and, in the US, receive no help from insurance or the state
Pairing comedy with Alzheimer’s disease would seem an impossible task. But that’s one of the things Seth Rogen and his wife Lauren Miller Rogen do to raise awareness of the disease through their charity HFC (Hilarity for Charity).
Prompted by Miller Rogan’s mother Adele Miller’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, the Hollywood couple began organising a yearly comedy event to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s in 2012. That culminated in a Netflix TV special, Seth Rogen’s Hilarity For Charity, in 2018.
The original intention of HFC was to use comedy to make younger people more aware of Alzheimer’s and to involve celebrities to remove the stigma.
It found a small brain aneurysm, which doctors monitored. When it began to grow, she had surgery to treat it, she revealed earlier this month, thanking the team who had guided her through the “scary experience” in a speech at the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery Visionary Ball in Los Angeles, California.
