In 2023, neurologists in a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they thought it was Alzheimer’s diseaseWhich makes him the youngest person ever to get the condition in the world.
The male teenager started to take memory around the age of 17, and the cognitive losses only deteriorated over the years.
The image of the patient’s brains showed shrinkage in the hippocampus, which is involved in the memory, and had his cerebrospinal liquid shifted to common markers of this most common form of dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often seen as the ailment of an old person, and yet early cases, including patients under the age of 65, good for a maximum of 10 percent of all diagnoses.
Almost all patients under the age of 30 can explain their Alzheimer’s by pathological gene mutations, so that they are placed in the Family Alzheimer’s Disease (FAD) category. The younger a person is when they get a diagnosis, the greater the chance that it is the result of a defective gene that they have inherited.
Nevertheless, researchers from Capital Medical University in Beijing could find neither of the usual mutations responsible for the early memory loss, nor any suspicious genes when they performed a genome -wide search.
Before this diagnosis in China, the youngest patient with Alzheimer’s was 21 years old. They wore the PSEN1 gene mutation, so that abnormal proteins accumulate in the brain, causing lumps toxic plaques to be formed, a common characteristic of Alzheimer’s.
Cases like those in China form something of a mystery. None of the 19-year-old family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making it difficult to categorize as a craze, but the teenager had no other diseases, infections or head trauma that could also explain his sudden cognitive decline.
Two years before he was referred to the memory clinic, the teenage patient began to struggle to concentrate in class. Reading also became difficult and his short -term memory fell. Often he could not remember any events from the day before, and he was always misplaced.
Eventually the cognitive decline became so bad, the young man could not finish high school, although he could still live independently.
A year after he had been referred to the memory clinic, he showed losses in immediate recall, discount delay after three minutes and after 30 minutes of long -term recall.
The full memorial score of the patient was 82 percent lower than that of peers of his own age, while his immediate memorial score was 87 percent lower.
Long-term follow-up is needed to support the diagnosis of the young man, but his medical team said the moment the patient “changed our understanding of the typical age of the beginning of AD”.
“The patient had a very early advertisement without clear pathogenic mutations,” Neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues Wrote in their research, “which suggests that his pathogenesis still has to be investigated.”
The Case Study, published in February 2023, only shows that Alzheimer’s follows no route and is much more complex than we thought, coming up via countless roads with different effects.
In a statement to the South China Morning Post, the neurologists describing the patient’s case argued that future studies should concentrate on cases of early starting to further improve our understanding of memory loss.
“Exploring the mysteries of young people with Alzheimer’s disease can become one of the most challenging scientific questions of the future,” they said.
The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2023.
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