Alzheimer, the mysterious case of the young Chinese who fell ill at the age of 17
Of course, the 17-year-old Chinese would have gladly done without being the youngest man in the world to have Alzheimer’s. But reality, unfortunately, has reserved this heavy fate for him. The Chinese boy was 17 years old, with no other health problems, when he was diagnosed with the terrible disease. At school he couldn’t concentrate and at 18 he didn’t even remember doing his homework or eating. A progressive and rapid cerebral deterioration forced him to abandon his studies in the last year of high school. In Beijing, researchers from the local university had to confirm, to their great surprise, that the boy was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. A pathology known to have old age as a risk factor.
Alzheimer, over half a million patients in Italy
Alzheimer’s dementia, according to the most recent data from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, today affects 5% of people over the age of 60 and around 500,000 suffer from it in Italy. Many Italian neurologists confirm that they have seen cases of Alzheimer’s in young people, over the age of 35, but never anyone under the age of twenty. In patients, two proteins beta-amyloid and tau accumulate in the brain. The first is found outside the brain cells while the second is inside the axons, the projections of the neurons. But the Chinese researchers did not find them in the brain of the young man who, instead, showed abnormal levels of the protein p-tau181 in the spinal fluid. Another aspect, for the moment mysterious, is that cases of Alzheimer’s disease in people under 30 were due to hereditary causes and three precise proteins had always been found: the amyloid precursor protein, presenilin 1 and presenilin 2. A child of a sufferer could have a 50% chance of developing the disease. The newest approved drug, lecanemab, manages to target these beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.
Alzheimer’s, no hereditary cause in young cinema
The second mystery of the pathology in the young Chinese is that there is no genetic origin resulting from the family. No one had ever suffered from Alzheimer’s. For the moment the case is, for the scientific community, an absolute mystery. What is found instead, even if in limited percentages, is an increasing trend of cases of young patients. And this is also quite inexplicable.
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