Aaron Hartman, MD examines a case of a 19-year-old from China diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, confirmed by PET scan and spinal fluid markers. He explores possible causes like vector-borne infections, toxin exposure, and metabolic factors, since the patient had no family history or head injury.
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Everybody. So some of you all may have seen the article from this morning about this 19 year old that was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And so I want to talk about that a little bit since there was an interest in it. So the first thing is this is not normal. It is not normal for a 19 year old to have Alzheimer's disease. I want to start with that. And so when I saw this article actually late last night, I showed it to my wife, who is a pediatric occupational therapist, and her first thought was, this can't be real. It's not possible for a 19 year old to have Alzheimer's. So when I looked at the article, I kind of read a little deeper and indeed, it did seem to be true. You know, they did some testing. This was from China. So this little child that had Alzheimer's diagnosed from China. The second thing is the symptoms started about two years prior to diagnosis and they actually did appropriate testing. They actually did a thing like a PET scan, looking at the brain where the brain has activity in the hippocampus to show decreased activity. They actually did a spinal tap looking for beta amyloid, which is something you do in severe. In patients with neurological issues that you're not quite sure where they're from, you will do that. And these are both positive. So indeed, this 19 year old does have Alzheimer's, which is unheard of, and the first in the medical history in the world of this being seen, which it's concerning. So a couple other interesting things about it are that this child had no family history, so you can't say that this was, it was genetic. The second part, there was no history of brain injury. So one of the questions people ask about dementia, like what are the kinds of dementia. I want to talk about that first before I talk about what I think might be going on with this 19 year old who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. There are six kinds of dementia, according to Dr. Dale Brinson, who's one of the top researchers in this world. Type 1's an inflammatory, inflamed brain. Type 2 is a atrophic or a deficiency type. That's when people have low nutrient levels, low hormone levels. Type 1.5 is actually related to diabetes. Type 3 is toxic. That's like your chronic lyme, your mold, et cetera. Type 4 is vascular and type 5 is traumatic. So when they said this child had no family history and no head injury, that kind of rules out type 5. But the thing about it is, what could be related, what could cause early premature Alzheimer's in My clinic, I do deal with a lot of neurologically damaged patients. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Pick's disease, frontotemporal dementia, whole host of things. And the most likely thing involved in this case of a young child might be some kind of vector borne illness. A lot of people don't realize in China right now, which is where this child is from, there's an epidemic of vector borne illness, basically ticks and diseases, ticks carry. So when I first came back to Richmond in 2007 for the military, I was told there's no Lyme disease in the Richmond area. Actually there's a lot of Lymes here in central Virginia and in China there's currently an epidemic of Lyme disease. So the first question I have is could this somehow be a tick borne related thing which would be type 3, type 3 Alzheimer's. The other thing to think about is that there's a lot of other infections that come along with, with Alzheimer's. So things like Babesia, Bartonella, these are other articulated things that make it worse. The other thing to think about is toxin exposure. If you live in anywhere around the military, around chemical waste site dump sites, there's a close correlation with certain chemicals and chemical exposures and neurological issues like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's for example. Just being in the military increases your risk for getting Parkinson's disease and als. So we know that chemical exposure. So my first question about this kid is where they live, what exposures were there, but even more so worldwide, what's been going on the last couple years that might be related to neurological issues like Alzheimer's? Back in the Russian flu, in late 1880s, about five or six years later, they started seeing a big uptick in Alzheimer's type illness, which they didn't really have. They had the name about, but they didn't quite know in Russia what to call at that point in time. Similar thing happened after the Spanish flu. About six or eight years later we saw a huge uptick in Alzheimer's neurological type issues. Part of me wonders, is this somehow related to what's been going on in our country the last couple of years? That would be concerning, especially if someone who's 19 is having neurological issues related to that. So the point is we need more research on this, we need more details. People like me, we see stuff like this just take deep dives, we research it, we try to find what's going on. And so I really feel like we need to know more about that with this child. But the point is this kind of patient we need to know more about. In the functional medicine world we see these patients who have these crazy diagnoses that can't be figured out. And so with this 19 year old with Alzheimer's, that's my those are my first kind of thoughts. You know what else is going on? Is there some kind of vector borne illness, tick related illness? Is there a toxin exposure and this is somehow related to their personal history of pandemic infections and whatnot in China. One thing they did not have a lot of vaccine uptake and they used a totally different vaccine than we used here. So that wouldn't apply. But it just makes me wonder what else is going on with this, with this child. So I want to share those thoughts because some people did have questions about how does a 19 year old get Alzheimer's disease? If people have additional questions, please let me know below I'll be open to share my insights. I want to give some brief overview of that article that piqued a lot of people's interest as well as mine and we'll continue to research and see if I can get more information about it. If I do, I'll share with everybody but hope that information was helpful. If you have additional questions, you can drop them below. And no one's really dropped any additional questions, so let me just make sure here. Yeah. So cool. So if you have additional questions, let me know. We'll do the best we can answer them. Take care, have a great weekend and we'll talk to you all soon.
