When the young get an old person’s disease

It started with burn marks on a bedsheet. Claire Wanjiku’s roommate noticed many brown streaks with distinct marks of an iron box scattered all over her bedding.

“When I asked her about the marks, she mumbled something about always forgetting when she is ironing,” says Pauline Waithera, who was her roommate and classmate at Kenyatta University. The two would make light banter of Claire’s legendary “scatter brain” because focusing on the task at hand was a challenge.

Then something happened that made Waithera realise that all was not well with her roommate.

“She was found wandering late at night near a supermarket in Kahawa Wendani, a few metres from where we stayed. When I went to pick her up, she was crying, curled up with her bag on the ground. She kept saying she lost her way home. She was shaking, visibly scared…,” says Waithera.

Claire was 26 at the time. Her mother Grace Kung’u remembers getting a call that her daughter had been admitted to hospital and diagnosed with delirium, an abrupt change in the brain that causes mental confusion and emotional disruption.

“The doctor said it may be from stress because she was in her final year of school and was under pressure to find a job,” says Kung’u.

Claire was prescribed anti-anxiety medication with a recommendation to go for psychological counselling twice a week.

The doctor recommended a brain scan after Claire started forgetting to do simple things like brushing her teeth, the day of the week, and she could not be trusted to take public transport because she would get lost.

“I will never forget the day I realised she was forgetting who I was. She would look at me as if trying to remember where she had seen me. I was losing her,” says Kung’u.

More hospitals tests revealed she was having early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable condition that alters the brain and causes memory loss. Even the doctors, Kung'u said, could not believe that a patient that young could have the condition because it is a disease of the old.

“Being told that your child who has not reached 30 years has Alzheimer’s kills something in you,” she says.

It has been four years since they got the diagnosis. She says she has watched her daughter getting trapped in her own world; one devoid of knowledge of her surrounding, where she cannot identify the people who were once close to her. She is unlearning all she ever knew.

“I visit her and she does not remember the things we did together. She has forgotten the man she was dating. She is now a new person,” says her former roommate Waithera.

Dr Florentius Koech, a neurosurgeon at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, says there has been an increase in the number of young people getting Alzheimer’s and dementia. He says the diagnosis is given after medics have ruled out all likely causes of the memory loss, including brain tumour, history of drug abuse and other neurological disorders.

“For young people, the main causes of dementia are conditions such as diabetes and having high urea,” he says, adding that head injury and genetics have also been found to be causing dementia among the young.

In Kisumu, genetics handed Mildred’s Achieng’s family a stroke of bad luck. Her husband, Joseph Odenyo, was 47 when they discovered he was losing his memory. She remembers the day he called her Eunice. It was 2014. She thought he was teasing her. Then he started forgetting his children’s names, where he worked, and other personal details. He was diagnosed with dementia and bipolar disorder. Three of his six children aged between 12 and 21 also started showing signs of forgetfulness, and were diagnosed with dementia.

“My husband left his job as a guard with a local security firm. My children dropped out of school. I had to abandon everything to care for four patients in the house,” says Achieng. 

She described being a caregiver of a family with demented patients as the hardest role a mother can ever take.

“My husband gets violent when I talk about things he cannot remember. I have to think through everything I say,” she says.

Her 21-year-old daughter was impregnated at 19 years, just a few months after she started showing signs of dementia. She cannot remember who the father is. She also forgets that she is a mother and rarely calls her son by name because she cannot remember it.

 “I always have to watch out for them, sometimes they forget how to dress up,” she says.