In 2023, a neurologist at a Chinese memory clinic diagnosed him as a 19-year-old who believed he had Alzheimer’s disease.makes him the youngest person diagnosed with a world condition.
Male teenagers began to experience memory loss around the age of 17, and cognitive losses worsened over the years.
Imaging of the patient’s brain shows contraction in the hippocampus involved in memory, and his cerebrospinal fluid suggests a common marker of this most common form of dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often considered an elderly disease, but early-onset cases, including patients under the age of 65, account for up to 10% of all diagnoses.
Almost all patients under the age of 30 can explain Alzheimer’s disease by pathological genetic mutations and fall into the family Alzheimer’s disease category (Trendy). The younger the person to be diagnosed, the more likely the gene is the result of a defect in the inherited gene.
However, researchers at Beijing’s capital Medical University were unable to find the usual mutations that cause early onset of memory loss or the suspicious genes that were performed when performing a genome-wide search.
Before this diagnosis in China, The youngest patient with Alzheimer’s disease I was 21 years old. They carried it PSEN1 gene mutationsabnormal proteins accumulate in the brain, forming masses of toxic plaque, a common feature of Alzheimer’s disease.
Cases like China bring something like mystery. None of the 19-year-old’s family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making it difficult to classify it as an epidemic, but teenagers suddenly suffered no other illness, infection, or head trauma that could explain cognitive decline.
Two years before being referred to a memory clinic, teenage patients began to struggle to concentrate on their class. Reading became difficult, and his short-term memories were reduced. Often he couldn’t remember what happened the day before, and he would always leave his belongings behind.
Ultimately, the cognitive decline became very poor, and although the youngsters were unable to graduate from high school, he was still able to live independently.
A year after being referred to the memory clinic, he showed losses with an immediate recall, a short delayed recall after 3 minutes and a long distance recall after 30 minutes.
The patient’s full-scale memory score was 82% lower than that of peers of his own age, and his immediate memory score was 87% lower.
Long-term follow-up is required to support the diagnosis of a young man, but his medical team I said At the time, patients were “changing their understanding of the typical age of AD.”
“The patient had very early onset AD and had no clear pathogenic mutations.” Neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues I wrote about their research“It suggests that this etiology needs to be investigated.”
A case study published in February 2023 shows that Alzheimer’s disease does not follow a single pathway.
in statement For South China Morning Post, neurologists who described patients’ cases argued that future research should focus on early-onset cases to further improve their understanding of memory loss.
“Exploring the mystery of young people with Alzheimer’s disease may be one of the most challenging scientific questions of the future.” I said.
This study was published in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2023.
