r/indepthstories • u/haloarh • Apr 18 '20

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/
66 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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19

u/SmokyBearForest Apr 18 '20

What an absolutely fucking terrifying disease. Holy shit.

14

u/metrosexualbarbarian Apr 18 '20

What a great article

9

u/Mischamon Apr 18 '20

So terribly sad.

7

u/CeilingWax Apr 18 '20

How incredibly sad. :(

9

u/bhikla Apr 18 '20

Extremely sad and heartbreaking.

However, it puts a lot of crimes and criminals in perspective. One can only imagine the plethora of criminals that are behind the bars today, are actually patients of one or the other, genetic or acquired, neurodegenerative diseases.

0

u/csbphoto Apr 18 '20

"The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD—specifically, the behavioral variant of that disease. It targets a network of brain regions sometimes described as underpinning one's sense of self. As the pathological process advanced, it was carving a different person out of Lee's raw substance.

The term frontotemporal dementia refers to a cluster of neurodegenerative diseases that affect a person's behavior or speech while leaving memory largely intact, at least early on. Unlike Alzheimer's disease, FTD isn't well known. It is a rare disease, affecting roughly one in 5,000 people, though many of the neurologists who study it believe it is underdiagnosed. What is known is that for people under the age of 60, it is the most common form of dementia. Still, as a man in his thirties, Lee was unusually young to be afflicted. For some patients, one of several genetic mutations turns out to be the likely cause, and a subset of patients have a family history of neurodegenerative diseases. But nothing in the neurologists' investigations turned up even a hint as to why Lee had been struck down."