She began experiencing memory loss at age 17, and the cognitive decline has only gotten worse over the years. Now that this young Chinese man has turned 19, the doctors seem to have finally found the disease that affects him. And it is none other than Alzheimer's.
This diagnosis, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, completely breaks conventional patterns regarding the age at which this affectation usually appears, which until now was limited exclusively to the elderly, according to researchers from the Xuanwu University Hospital in Beijing.
The patient had typical features of Alzheimer's disease, including memory loss and hippocampal atrophy, a shrinkage that is an early marker of the disease. But it was difficult for him to accept this result in a teenager, so he had to rule out other possibilities.
“[The study] proposes to pay attention to early-onset Alzheimer's. Exploring the mysteries of young people with this disease may become one of the most challenging scientific questions of the future," the authors said in a statement. This affectation is a rare form of dementia that affects people under 65 years of age and represents between 5 and 10 percent of all cases.
Almost all patients under the age of 30 have pathological genetic mutations, experts explain. To date, the youngest known person diagnosed was a 21-year-old who carried a mutation in the PSEN1 gene, which causes abnormal proteins to accumulate in the brain, forming clumps of toxic plaques,
The Chinese patient, however, differs from previous cases because no genetic alterations were identified. None of his family members had a history of Alzheimer's or dementia, and the teen had no other diseases, infections, or head injuries that could explain his sudden cognitive decline.
Two years prior to the hospital consultation, the patient began to have difficulty concentrating in his high school classes. His situation worsened a year later when he began to suffer apparent short-term memory loss, the researchers recall.
She couldn't remember the events of the previous day or where her belongings were stored, and she had difficulty reading. Besides, his reactions were late. His retention ability gradually declined. He often did not remember if he had eaten or not and could not finish his homework. He even had to drop out of school.
Their results were abnormal on the auditory-verbal learning test, a widely used test that assesses losses in immediate recall, short-delay recall after three minutes, and long-delay recall after 30 minutes, say neurologists at Xuanwu Hospital.
The tests suggested that his memory was significantly affected. Her large-scale retention score was 82 percent lower than other teens her age, while her immediate memory score was 87 percent lower.
The researchers believe long-term follow-up is necessary to support the boy's diagnosis, but his medical team assumes the patient is altering his "understanding of the typical age of onset of Alzheimer's," concludes the team led by neurologist Jianping Jia.
