Apparently, life didn’t read my plan,” said Jeremy Scott, a 47-year-old mortgage loan originator in Florida whose life was changed forever after an unexpected health diagnosis this month. "I’m a husband, a dad, I work, I go to the gym, I drive. I go to Disney probably way too much, and now I also happen to be navigating Alzheimer’s.” He decided to share his journey with the disease on his social media channels (@itsjeremyscottofficial on TikTok, Instagram, and Threads).
He began talking about his diagnosis publicly because “when most people hear Alzheimer’s, they picture someone much older and much further along in the disease. That’s not what my life looks like right now," he said. Scott was officially diagnosed on September 12, “but looking back, there were things happening before then,” he told Newsweek.
A couple of years ago, he remembers being at Disney’s Contemporary Resort and being unable to find his water bottle. He had searched everywhere all over the resort, from restaurants to shops, before returning to his room to find the bottle was “basically sitting right in front of me.” “Everyone loses things," he said. "I lose my keys, you lose your phone, that’s life.
But this was one of those moments where I thought, ‘Okay, that was weird.’” As time went on, he began noticing other things. The symptoms Scott was experiencing may have been critical signs of his later diagnosis. Alzheimer’s disease could potentially begin decades before clinical symptoms appear, with its pathology accumulating over 10 to 30 years before the diagnosis, noted a May study in the journal GeroScience.
The study found that blood biomarkers associated with self-reported memory concerns may offer early clues for how the disease may later develop. This association suggests that “AD [Alzheimer’s disease] pathology may begin before age 45 and is associated with subtle changes in cognition that are not at measurable levels,” the study said. Scott’s official diagnosis “wasn’t completely out of nowhere,” he noted.
"So, there were a lot of pieces to this puzzle.” Around the time just before he received his official diagnosis, he suspected Alzheimer’s disease was a real possibility, after going through cognitive testing, MRIs, blood testing, and other neurological testing. However, “knowing something might happen and actually hearing it are two completely different things.” “I remember thinking, I’m 47 years old. I have a wife, kids, a career, and plans.
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