YAHOO! – In 2023, neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believed to be Alzheimer’s disease, making him the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with the condition in the world.
The male teenager began experiencing memory decline around age 17, and the cognitive losses only worsened over the years.
Imaging of the patient’s brain showed shrinkage in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and his cerebrospinal fluid hinted at common markers of this most common form of dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often thought of as an old person’s ailment, and yet early-onset cases, which include patients under the age of 65, account for up to 10 percent of all diagnoses.
Almost all patients under 30 years of age can have their Alzheimer’s explained by pathological gene mutations, putting them into the category of familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD).
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The younger a person is when they receive a diagnosis, the more likely it is the result of a faulty gene they’ve inherited.
Yet researchers at the Capital Medical University in Beijing couldn’t find any of the usual mutations responsible for the early onset of memory loss, nor any suspect genes when they performed a genome-wide search.
Before this diagnosis in China, the youngest patient with Alzheimer’s was 21 years old. They carried the PSEN1 gene mutation, which causes abnormal proteins to build up in the brain, forming clumps of toxic plaques, a common feature of Alzheimer’s.
Cases like the one in China pose something of a mystery. None of the 19-year-old’s family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making it hard to categorize as FAD, yet the teenager had no other diseases, infections, or head trauma that could explain his sudden cognitive decline either …