After a 19-year-old got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at a memory clinic in China, many voiced concerns about how the condition couldn’t just be limited to the older population.
The fear of the disease affecting the youth became more serious when the patient’s case was revealed to have began early. The youngest person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, whose identity was not revealed, began experiencing the early signs of the condition years prior.
In response to Science Alert, the patient began experiencing memory decline at 17. His cognitive losses also got worse quickly as imaging of his brain showed shrinkage within the hippocampus, the part involved in memory.
The teenager’s case brought more attention to the condition typically considered an old person’s disease. Patients below 65 only account for 10% of all diagnoses.
Given the patient’s mind-boggling case, many fear that early onset amongst teens and folks below 30 could possibly be happening under the radar. Below are the early warning signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease everyone should pay attention to amid these uncertain times:
- Memory problems
- Struggling to search out the correct word/s
- Trouble understanding visual images
- Having a tough time determining spatial relationships
- Impaired reasoning or judgment
The National Institute on Aging said the aforementioned signs and symptoms are typically the primary to emerge in early cases. Nevertheless, the symptoms may vary from one person to a different.
In mild cases, an individual may appear healthy. But they could be struggling to make sense of the world around them. It often takes time for the person and their family to understand the medical problem, as per the institute.
Before the teenager, the youngest case was a 21-year-old patient with a gene mutation that causes abnormal proteins to accumulate within the brain.
In the teenager’s case, researchers on the Capital Medical University in Beijing couldn’t find the same old mutations accountable for the early onset of the disease. Their genome-wide search also didn’t discover any suspect genes, in response to his medical team’s report.
The teenager’s family never had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia. His sudden cognitive decline was unexplainable since he didn’t produce other diseases, infections, and even head trauma. His condition only became apparent when he began to search out it hard to focus at school.
The team said the patient requires long-term follow-up to administer his condition. In addition they noted that the bizarre case alters the medical community’s “understanding of the everyday age of onset of [Alzheimer’s disease].”