In 2023, a neurologist at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old boy with Alzheimer’s disease.This made him the youngest person in the world to be diagnosed with the disease.
The teenager began experiencing memory loss around the age of 17, and his cognitive decline only worsened as he got older.
Imaging of the patient’s brain showed shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and cerebrospinal fluid suggested a common marker for this most common form of dementia..
Although Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often thought of as a disease of the elderly, early-onset cases, including patients younger than 65 years, account for up to 10% of all diagnoses.
Almost all patients under the age of 30, whose Alzheimer’s disease can be explained by pathological genetic mutations, fall into the category of familial Alzheimer’s disease (fashion). The younger you are when you are diagnosed, the more likely it is to be the result of an inherited defective gene.
But when researchers at Beijing’s Capital Medical University conducted a genome-wide search, they found neither the usual mutation that causes early onset memory loss nor the suspect gene.
Before receiving this diagnosis in China, youngest Alzheimer’s patient I was 21 years old. They carried PSEN1 gene mutationThis causes abnormal proteins to build up in the brain, forming clumps of toxic plaque that are a common feature of Alzheimer’s disease.
Incidents like the one in China raise a certain mystery. There was no history of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia in the 19-year-old’s family, so it is difficult to classify him as having FAD, but the boy had other illnesses, infections, and headaches that could explain his sudden cognitive decline. There were no injuries.
Two years before being referred to the memory clinic, the teenage patient began having trouble concentrating in class. Reading became difficult and short-term memory deteriorated. I often couldn’t remember what happened the day before, and I always misplaced my belongings.
Eventually, cognitive decline became so severe that the young man was unable to graduate from high school, although he was still able to live independently.
One year after being referred to the memory clinic, he showed loss of immediate recall, short-delayed recall after 3 minutes, and long-delayed recall after 30 minutes.
This patient’s full-scale memory score was 82 percent lower than his age-matched patients, and his immediate memory score was 87 percent lower.
Long-term follow-up is needed to confirm this young man’s diagnosis, but his medical team said At the time, patients were “changing our understanding of the typical age of onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”
“The patient had very early-onset Alzheimer’s disease with no obvious pathogenic mutations.” Neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues wrote in their research“This suggests that its etiology still needs to be investigated.”
This case study, published in February 2023, shows that Alzheimer’s disease does not follow a single pathway; more complicated more than we expected, through many paths It has various effects.
in statement Neurologists who described the patient’s case to the South China Morning Post argued that future research should focus on early-onset cases to better understand memory loss.
“Exploring the mysteries of young people with Alzheimer’s disease may become one of the most challenging scientific problems of the future,” they write. said.
This research alzheimer’s disease journal.
A previous version of this article was published in February 2023.
