The Washington Post (1/23, Johnson ) reports that for some patients with a variant of Alzheimer’s disease “called posterior cortical atrophy, the disease begins with problems affecting vision rather than memory. The unusual early symptoms mean that thousands of people may go years before receiving the correct diagnosis, experts said.” However, “that may change with the first large-scale international study of the condition, published Monday in the journal Lancet Neurology.”
The researchers “found that, on average, the syndrome begins affecting patients at age 59 – about five to six years earlier than most patients with the more common form of Alzheimer’s.” They “say that the variant may account for as many as 10 percent of all Alzheimer’s cases; that would put the number of Americans with the condition close to 700,000.”
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