After ignoring the little hints of memory loss that he experienced in his 30’s, an Aussie man is urging others to give the warnings of young onset Alzheimer’s the attention they deserve.

When most of us think about Alzheimer’s, we imagine it as something far off – something that affects our grandparents, not someone in the prime of their life. But for Fraser, a 41-year-old father from Australia, that misconception was shattered in mid-2024 when he was officially diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s.

Also knowns as early-onset Alzheimer’s, the disease affects people younger than 65. Since it is less common, “health care providers generally don’t look for Alzheimer’s disease in younger people,” making “an accurate diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s” a “long and frustrating process,” according to the Alzheimer’s Association that adds the disease is “not a normal part of aging.”

While it is uncommon, the Mayo Clinic estimates that of every 100,000 adults between ages 30 and 64, about 110 have young-onset Alzheimer’s.

‘Pretty big memory flaws’

Fraser is among the very unfortunate few who have young-onset Alzheimer’s and for him, the symptoms didn’t suddenly appear – they had been creeping in slowly for two years before his diagnosis.

“It’s funny because I don’t remember what my symptoms really were initially. All I remember was having some pretty big memory flaws,” the Aussie dad said in one of the first clips he shared on his channel “I (don’t) have dementia.”

Fraser uses the channel to open up about the emotional and mental rollercoaster that led to his diagnosis, and the little warning signs that he ignored along the way.

“I was sitting down to watch a movie and my partner’s gone, ‘Yeah, we watched that like a month ago.’ I watched the whole movie, and the ending was still a complete surprise. I had no memory of watching it whatsoever. I didn’t watch many movies either at the time, so it was it was a bit concerning,” said the teacher and researcher.

But he didn’t think too much about the movie night until he started having larger lapses in memory.

‘Where is my daughter?’

The turning point came when he spent a terror-filled evening driving around looking for his teenage daughter, who he thought was missing.

The girl was at the movies – a plan she arranged with her father earlier in the day – but he had forgotten.

“I remember my daughter had told me numerous times throughout the day that she’d go to the movies that night and it would be sort of quite late with a friend,” he said.

“It came to nighttime, and I started freaking out, thinking, where’s my daughter? I was driving to the nearby town trying to see if other friends had heard from her…And it got to a point where I was about to ring the police, I was that concerned.”

The panicked father explained he had “been trying to call her, trying to phone message, trying to message her, and just not getting through to her at all.”

“And then she ends up calling me, saying, like, hey dad, I’ve just been in the movies. Remember, I told you?’”

‘Shallow thinking’

It was his two daughters, he explains, who gave him the courage to recognize his “earliest symptoms” that he initially believed were “casual.”

“So I asked my kids just sort of casually and they said, everyone has memory issues that they have, they forget stuff in everyday life – we just noticed that you were just doing them more often, more frequently just normal, everyday memory lapses that everyone has.”

He made the decision to see a doctor, and, in May 2024, Fraser was diagnosed with younger-onset Alzheimer’s.

“It wasn’t until even probably just a few months before the diagnosis I noticed that I was having issues with just thinking – being able to think deeply. I found that I had more sort of surface level thinking, more shallow thinking,” he said of his cognitive impairement.

Mental health ‘crashed’

In a more recent clip, Fraser explained to his 14.3 thousand followers that when he was first diagnosed, he “kind of wanted to put it all out of [his] head” and “not think about it, like six months later, five months.”

Living in denial however caused his mental health to crash.

Fraser explained that out of nowhere, he started having panic attacks and realized that he was avoiding the truth, trying to “bury [his] head in the sand.”

“But really it’s always in the back of your mind and so I just wasn’t dealing with it,” he said adding that a psychologist helped him “unpack.”

‘Brain has had enough’

As the disease takes its toll, Fraser said he’s “forgotten” how to do simple things he’s practiced “a thousand times,” like turning off the shower or driving his partner’s car.

“A fog just comes over your brain and you just can’t really focus on things very well and you’re in a haze,” he said.

Fraser adds, “my brain has had enough.”

Fraser isn’t trying to be a hero – he’s just trying to be real. That authenticity is helping break the stigma around early-onset dementia and reminding others to listen to the signs, even when they seem small.