They define a type of Alzheimer’s disease in younger people

Latin News Agency for Medicine and Public Health

With information from Mayo Clinic

A group of researchers from Mayo Clinic discovered a type of Alzheimer disease It attacks people from the age of 40, with the presence of atypical symptoms that affect other areas of the brain and that is not usually associated with Alzheimer’s.

In this study, the researchers describe a progressive dysexecutive syndrome that they say affects people’s ability to organize, plan, and perform multiple tasks while overcoming the dysfunctions of the episodic memory system seen in the disease. Alzheimer’s disease. Although this type of Alzheimer’s disease is not recent, it has not yet been defined or studied exhaustively, which contributes to making erroneous or late diagnoses. The article was published in Brain Communications.

«It affects young people during their working years. They may lose their job and not qualify for disability benefits because the reasons for a drop in job performance are not identified as Alzheimer’s disease, “says the Dr. David Jones, a Mayo Clinic neurologist and lead author of the study. “Often times, there is a delay in treatment and counseling because neither patients nor health care providers manage to recognize it.”

For the study, the researchers defined the clinical, imaging, pathological, and genetic characteristics of a clinical presentation of Alzheimer’s disease not previously described that predominantly affects executive cognitive abilities. The researchers reported characteristics of 55 patients with a newly defined type of Alzheimer’s disease with unusual or atypical symptoms. The average age of onset was 53.8 years and the average age of diagnosis was 57.2 years, which highlights the early age of onset and the lack of recognition of this syndrome that leads to delays in diagnosis.

«Losing a job due to problems with organization, planning and execution of work tasks may be the first indication. Generally, a patient can take over daily activities, such as driving a vehicle, but will do poorly on a comprehensive cognitive test because of the executive functions required to perform these tests, “says Dr. Ryan Townley, neurologist at Mayo Clinic at the time. of the study and first author of the manuscript, who currently works at the Kansas University Alzheimer’s Disease Center. “There is a disparity in cognitive abilities, and people believe that the patient has anxiety or depression and is not trying.”

The researchers found that these people can have normal hippocampal formations. Traditionally, it was believed that the determining characteristic of Alzheimer’s was the atrophy of this structure, added to memory loss. In contrast, patients with progressive dysexecutive syndrome as a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease show atrophy in the parietal lobe, which is believed to be responsible for triggering executive dysfunction. Given the early onset, patients with progressive dysexecutive syndrome tend not to manifest concomitant pathologies that occur along with other age-related disorders. This data, together with the recently defined Age-associated predominantly limbic TDP-43 encephalopathy, or LATE, a condition that differs from Alzheimer’s disease that affects memory and the hippocampus, indicates that a significant change is needed in the way researchers recognize and study Alzheimer’s .

“It is a condition that specifically affects the executive function of the brain,” says Dr. Jones. “Therefore, it has the ability to inform us about the biological mechanisms that are required for the executive functions of the brain and the mechanisms that cause Alzheimer’s disease.”

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