{"id":487405,"date":"2026-01-02T15:56:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T15:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/487405\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T15:56:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T15:56:14","slug":"the-sad-case-of-the-youngest-person-ever-to-be-diagnosed-with-alzheimers-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/487405\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sad Case of The Youngest Person Ever to Be Diagnosed With Alzheimer’s : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2022, neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believed to be Alzheimer’s<\/a> disease \u2013 making him the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with the condition.<\/p>\n

The teen first began experiencing memory decline around age 17, with symptoms worsening over time.<\/p>\n

Brain scans revealed shrinkage in the hippocampus, a region involved in memory, while his cerebrospinal fluid showed biomarkers consistent with Alzheimer’s \u2013 the most common form of dementia.<\/p>\n

Related: Alzheimer’s Can Strike as Young as 30. These Are The Signs to Watch For.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Although usually associated with older age, early-onset cases of Alzheimer’s (those occurring in individuals under age 65) represent up to 10 percent of all diagnoses.<\/p>\n

\"olderAlzheimer’s is today an incredibly common disease among older people, but it’s comparatively rare in the young. (zeljkosantrac\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Almost all Alzheimer’s patients under the age of 30 can have their disease explained by pathological gene mutations, classifying them as having familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The younger a person is when they receive a diagnosis, the more likely it is attributable to an inherited genetic mutation.<\/p>\n

However, researchers at Beijing’s Capital Medical University were unable to find any of the usual mutations responsible for the early onset of memory loss, nor any suspect genes, after conducting a genome-wide search.<\/p>\n

“This is the youngest case ever reported to meet the diagnostic criteria for probable Alzheimer’s disease without recognized genetic mutations,” neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues write in their study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before this diagnosis in China, the youngest patient with Alzheimer’s<\/a> was 21 years old. They carried the PSEN1 gene mutation<\/a>, which causes abnormal proteins to build up in the brain, forming clumps of toxic plaques, a common feature of Alzheimer’s.<\/p>\n

Related: Alzheimer’s Expert Explains How Genetic Mutations Can Slow The Disease<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

Cases like this one pose something of a mystery.<\/p>\n

None of the 19-year-old’s family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making it difficult to categorize it as FAD. Yet, the teenager had no other diseases, infections, or head trauma that could explain his sudden cognitive decline either.<\/p>\n

Related: Scientists Discover Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two years before being referred to the memory clinic, the teenage patient began struggling to focus in class. Reading also became difficult, and his short-term memory declined.<\/p>\n

Oftentimes, he couldn’t remember events from the day before, and he was always misplacing his belongings.<\/p>\n

\"SeniorPatients aged 65 and older account for the vast majority of Alzheimer’s disease cases. The younger a person is when they receive a diagnosis, the more likely the condition is caused by an inherited genetic mutation. (Motortion\/Canva)<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the cognitive decline became so bad, the young man was unable to finish high school, although he could still live independently.<\/p>\n

A year after referral to the memory clinic, he showed deficits in immediate recall, short-delay recall after 3 minutes, and long-delay recall after 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

The patient’s full-scale memory score was 82 percent lower than that of his same-age peers, whereas his immediate memory score was 87 percent lower.<\/p>\n

Related: We May Now Know Why Alzheimer’s Erases Memories of Our Loved Ones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Long-term follow-up is needed to support the young man’s diagnosis, but his medical team said<\/a> at the time the patient was “altering our understanding of the typical age of onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”<\/p>\n

“The patient had very early-onset Alzheimer’s disease with no clear pathogenic mutations,” the researchers write<\/a>, “which suggests that its pathogenesis still needs to be explored.”<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

The case study, published in February 2023, just goes to show that Alzheimer’s doesn’t follow a single pathway, and is much more complex<\/a> than we thought, emerging via numerous avenues<\/a> with varying effects.<\/p>\n

In a statement<\/a> to the South China Morning Post, the neurologists who described the patient’s case argued that future studies should focus on early-onset cases to further improve our understanding of memory loss.<\/p>\n

“Exploring the mysteries of young people with Alzheimer’s disease may become one of the most challenging scientific questions of the future,” they said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this article was published in February 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2022, neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believed to be…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":487406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[210,352,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-487405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-msft-content","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115826326840913301","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}