A 19-year-old man was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by neurologists at a clinic in China. The young man is believed to be the youngest person in the world to suffer from the condition.
19-year-old diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Photo: Shutterstock
The teenager began experiencing memory decline around the age of 17, and the cognitive losses worsened over the next two years.
Imaging investigations of his brain showed a reduction in the size of the hippocampus, the region responsible for memory, and the cerebrospinal fluid indicated the presence of markers specific to this common form of dementia, according to sciencealert.com, which cites a study published in the “Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.” .
Alzheimer’s disease is often associated with the elderly, but early-onset cases, which include patients under 65, account for up to 10% of all diagnoses. In the case of most patients under the age of 30, Alzheimer’s can be explained by pathological gene mutations, classifying it in the category of familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD).
The case is considered a medical enigma
The younger a person is at the time of diagnosis, the more likely the disease is caused by an inherited faulty gene, experts say. However, researchers at Capital Medical University in Beijing were unable to find any of the common genetic mutations responsible for early memory loss or any other suspect genes in a genome-wide search.
Cases like the one in China are an enigma. None of the 19-year-old’s family members had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making classification very difficult. In addition, the teenager did not have any other diseases, infections or cranial trauma that could explain his sudden cognitive decline, the quoted source said.
Two years before being referred to the clinic, the patient began to have difficulty concentrating in class. Reading had become difficult and his short-term memory was deteriorating. He often couldn’t remember the events of the previous day and frequently lost things.
Eventually, the cognitive decline became so severe that the young man was unable to finish high school. One year after he was referred to the clinic, significant immediate memory loss was noted.
His total memory score was 82% lower than his peers, while immediate memory was 87% lower.
The medical team stated that the patient “changes our understanding of the typical age of disease onset“.
“The patient presented with very early-onset Alzheimer’s without clear pathogenic mutations,” neuroscientist Jianping Jia and colleagues wrote in their study, “cwhich suggests that its pathogenesis still needs to be explored“.
The study, published in February 2023, emphasizes that Alzheimer’s does not follow a single pathway and is much more complex than previously thought, manifesting through different pathways and having varied effects.
Until this diagnosis in China, the youngest patient diagnosed with Alzheimer’s was 21 years old and had the PSEN1 gene mutation, which causes abnormal proteins to accumulate in the brain, forming toxic plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s.
