Female celebrities join push for brain research
“I can’t float,” laments the woman who’s given her feline gait to some of fashion’s most recognizable moments, and was the first black model on the September issue of Vogue.
“I can’t swim,” Naomi Campbell reiterated to me. “But I can dive!”
It was a point she’d made just minutes prior at an intimate talk/ cocktail organized by the Women’s Brain Health Initiative, hatched in Canada, but extending its tentacles in New York City, inside a Tribeca studio space, the other night.
Looking every bit the force of nature, while dangling her storied legs just a few feet away, the stunner had been talking about the “breathing class” she’d sought to take when she discovered that she had never “learned to properly breathe.”
That experience led her to diving (Alexander McQueen told her to scuba dive, actually!) and, well, giving herself permission to take regular “time off” from work as a boon to her overall well-being.
“We shouldn’t just be thinking of dementia as an old person’s disease.” LYNN POSLUNS FOUNDER OF THE WOMEN’S BRAIN HEALTH INITIATIVE
There’s another thing: Campbell, whose name is inevitably yoked with the word “phone,” reveals that, at night, she leaves her mobile in another room, so it is not the first thing she naturally checks in the morning. A better person than I am, she is. A woman who’s also pretty swell: Toronto’s Lynn Posluns.
Working a Lanvin dress, rocking a warm red helmet and brandishing a power-rolodex, she’s the one, tonight, who had brought out Campbell, together with a coterie of high-achieving ladies, including OG supermodel Lauren Hutton, actorly scion Mamie Gummer, psychiatrist-socialite Samantha Boardman and Sex and the City generator Candace Bushnell. To round things out, legendary editor Tina Brown had been recruited to lead the discussion.
Posluns, who founded the Women’s Brain Health Initiative in 2012, clearly has that kind of allure.
Mandated with providing literacy and funding research to take on grey matter diseases, in women in particular, her organization (founded in concert with Baycrest) has been running the map and ramping up the boldface.
When she first launched the event in Toronto, it was done so with a spiffy party hosted by Heather Reisman and marquee’d by Arianna Huffington.
At its south-of-the-border initiation, held last year in Manhattan, the guest list included everyone from Martha Stewart to Tamara Mellon to Wendi Deng Murdoch, while a similar do, held on the other coast, in L.A., brought out the likes of Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith and Lisa Eisner.
What’s not exactly rocket science? The idea that charitable groups, and even science research, can use the leg-up of “influencers” from both the worlds of celebrity and society. Posluns knows.
Some are attracted to the cause because they have someone in their family who’s suffered from a brain aneurysm, or had a relative who’s dealt with Alzheimer’s (in Campbell’s case, it was her grandmother).
Many others, who are younger, just want to make sure their cognitive abilities are intact, since it’s a fact — as Posluns never gets tired of saying — nearly “70 per cent of Alzheimer sufferers are women.” (Not to mention, some 35 million women are living with dementia, a number expected to triple by 2050.)
For this go-getter, things are all too personal: her family has long been intertwined with Baycrest.
Posluns’ grandfather helped secure the land on which the Toronto research hospital stands, and one family member or another has served on its board ever since.
And though one foot remains lodged in the world of private equity — she is the managing director of Cedarpoint Investments Inc. — her singular passion rests with the issues of female neurological health.
Research is the thing, she often says, churning out her favourite factoid: the one about how, in so many labs, “it’s the male rat that’s studied, because the female rat, with its hormones, makes it too complex.” Her main goals? To “level the research playing field,” and also to hone in on the message that lifestyle choices (not to mention stress levels) can be as much a factor as genetic disposition when it comes to dementia.
“We shouldn’t just be thinking of dementia as an old person’s disease,” she says. “By the time the symptoms show, the damage to the brain has happened 20 to 25 years earlier.”
When I asked Posluns, after the New York event, what she’s doing differently these days to protect her own cognitive vitality, she was frank.
“I definitely eat healthier . . . and drink more red wine than white (as goes the vino research). I still need to learn how to sleep better, though.”
Maybe time to pull a Naomi and stop bringing the phone to bed?