Last year, neurologists at a clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease, making him the youngest person in the world ever diagnosed with the disease. But there’s something wrong.
After transmitting Alzheimer’s to mice, this time we’re talking about the youngest Alzheimer’s patient in the world. The teenager began to experiment a decline in memory around age 17 and the cognitive losses have only gotten worse over the years.
Two years before being referred to the clinic, the boy began to notice streaks difficulty concentrating in class. Reading also became difficult and his short-term memory declined. He often couldn’t remember the events of the day before and always lost his things.
In a short time, the cognitive decline became so severe that the young man he failed to finish high school. Her long-term memory score was 82% lower than that of peers her age, while her short-term memory score was 87% lower.
Imaging of the patient’s brain showed a clear narrowing of the hippocampus, an area significantly involved in memory. Furthermore, his cerebrospinal fluid suggested the presence of common markers for this widespread pathology, effectively confirming the diagnosis.
Alzheimer’s disease is often considered an older person’s disease, yet early-onset cases account for up to 10% of all diagnoses. Almost all Patients under 30 may have Alzheimer’s disease explained by pathological genetic mutations. This time however, something is wrong.
In the published study sul Journal of Alzheimer’s Diseaseresearchers from the Capital Medical University in Beijing, in fact they were unable to find any of mutations usually responsible for the early onset of memory loss. Not happy, they then carried out a search on the entire genome, but also in this case no suspicious gene emerged.
To make matters worse, no member of the 19-year-old’s family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia. The boy also does not have any particular medical conditions such as head trauma or infections that could explain his sudden cognitive decline.
To underline the particularity of the case, it is sufficient to remember that before this diagnosis, the youngest patient suffering from Alzheimer’s was 21 years old. However, unlike the “new” patient, had the PSEN1 gene mutationwhich causes the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain, a common feature of the condition.
“The patient had a disease of Very early onset Alzheimer’s without clear pathogenic mutations. which suggests that its pathogenesis remains to be explored “said neurologist Jianping Jia.
Having recently discovered 5 variants of Alzheimer’s, all this further shows us how widespread this form of dementia is does not follow a single pathproving decidedly more complex than expected.