19-Year-Old with Alzheimer’s

[Jim Allen]

11 October 2024 ByCarly Cassella
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-sad-case-of-the-youngest-person-ever-diagnosed-with-alzheimers

In Brief:

In 2023, neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believed to be Alzheimer's disease, making him the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with the condition in the world.

The male teenager began experiencing memory decline around age 17, and the cognitive losses only worsened over the years.

Imaging of the patient's brain showed shrinkage in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and his cerebrospinal fluid hinted at common markers of this most common form of dementia.

Almost all patients under 30 years of age can have their Alzheimer's explained by pathological gene mutations, putting them into the category of familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD). Yet researchers at the Capital Medical University in Beijing couldn't find any of the usual mutations responsible for the early onset of memory loss, nor any suspect genes when they performed a genome-wide search.

None of the 19-year-old's family had a history of Alzheimer's or dementia, making it hard to categorize as FAD, yet the teenager had no other diseases, infections, or head trauma that could explain his sudden cognitive decline either.

A year after being referred to the memory clinic, he showed losses in immediate recall, short-delay recall after three minutes, and long-delay recall after 30 minutes.

The patient's full-scale memory score was 82 percent lower than that of peers his own age, while his immediate memory score was 87 percent lower.

A 19-Year-Old Adolescent with Probable Alzheimer’s Disease
https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad221065

[numbersguy82]

Wow that’s insanely tragic. To be so young and be robbed of your memory. What a shame.

[leatherman]

Wow that’s insanely tragic.

what you said. wow. so sad.

[Jim Allen]

Wow that’s insanely tragic.

Indeed.