One of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease is age, but it can also occur in very young patients. Beijing doctors describe the case of a 19-year-old man who has all the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
The vast majority of the 850,000 people with Alzheimer’s in France are over 65, but among those diagnosed, there is a minority of young or even very young patients. According France Alzheimer, approximately 33,000 people have developed Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias before the age of 65. Only 5,000 of them were diagnosed before the age of 60.
So the case of this young 19-year-old Chinese is exceptional! If his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is confirmed, he might be the youngest patient to have declared this neurodegenerative disease according to neurologists from Xuanwu University Hospital, Beijing, who cared for him.
Signs of Alzheimer’s in a 19-year-old man
The young patient has suffered from short-term memory and concentration problems since the age of seventeen. At nineteen, his memory loss worsened, he forgot whether he had lunch or not, didn’t finish his homework… which led him to go to the hospital. The neurologists made him pass a reference cognitive test, the WHO-UCLA AVLT, the results of which confirmed his cognitive disorders.
Her brain MRI shows hippocampal atrophy and decreased activity in the temporal lobe. Finally, the analyzes of the cerebrospinal fluid taken by a lumbar puncture reveal the presence of a large quantity of tau and abnormal β-amyloid proteins (β-42 form). All these markers are found frequently in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, but a mystery remains in this case.
A very early sporadic form?
When Alzheimer’s disease does not develop because of age, it is often linked to genetic predispositions. Certain genetic variants, transmitted from generation to generation, promote the onset of Alzheimer’s within families. We then speak of the family form of the disease; it represents between 1 and 2% of all diagnoses, but almost 10% of those made in young people. The three implicated genes known to date are: PSEN1, PSEN2 and APP. About 50% of people carrying a mutation in PSEN1 develop the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s before the age of 40.
However, in the case of this young Chinese patient, no genetic marker has been identified. It seems that he is suffering from the sporadic form of Alzheimer’s, like an elderly person. Neurologists are not sure if it is Alzheimer’s disease, he has been diagnosed as “probably affected”.
In the scientific literature, other cases of young people with Alzheimer’s symptoms are described, such as that of a man oftwenty years in Spain ora 33-year-old woman in Shanghaiboth carriers of a mutation in the PSEN1 gene.