Anger at treatment of 41-year-old dementia mum

A mum who developed dementia aged 39 has been abandoned by medics as the deadly disease takes hold, her family has claimed.

Kelly Watson is battling rapidly-progressing dementia which has left her struggling to speak and unable to support herself.

The mum-of-one has been forced to give up her job, move in with her mum and faces a bleak future as the disease develops. But despite being among the youngest in the country to have the disease, her family claims she has not been given any treatment to help slow its progression.

Her desperate plight has emerged just weeks after Prime Minister David Cameron announced more than £300 million is to be ploughed into making the UK a world leader in dementia care.

Her distraught mum Moira Bell, 62, blasted: “I really feel strongly about the way things have been handled. She’s not had any kind of treatment and we have had to go months at a time between tests I feel like she is just a number.”

Kelly, now 41, who is mum to 17-year-old Holly, “loved” her job as a clerical officer in the civil service, but started to struggle at work around three years ago. Colleagues noticed her having difficulty on the telephones, mood swings and tremors in her body.

Meanwhile her worried mum Moira, step-dad William, 52, and siblings Lisa, 38, and twins Michael and Michelle, 43, noticed “bubbly and carefree” Kelly shrinking into herself. She was repeatedly diagnosed with depression and anxiety despite Kelly’s protestations she was not suffering mental health problems. Eventually they persuaded a GP to refer Kelly for a scan and on June 23 last year her 41st birthday she was given the dementia diagnosis.

Moira said the condition, which is normally associated with elderly patients, has taken hold fast and while it has not yet affected Kelly’s memory, it has ruined her life.

She said: “It is really hard, I cannot really think of the future because I’m terrified of what she’s going to be like.”

Despite a host of tests and scans at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, medics have not been able to pinpoint the type of dementia Kelly has. As such, they claim she has not received any medication, which could slow the progression of the disease.

Moira, of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, said during her last consultation in January, she was told that no treatment could be offered and they should come back in six months’ time.

She added: “I said ‘six months’ time, what do I say when I go back to my granddaughter and tell her we don’t know what’s wrong with her mum? She’s had no treatment, nothing. We’re having to put her house up for sale, she has been retired from the civil service and we are still in the dark.”

Anna Eden, service manager with charity Young Dementia UK, said most services are for people with dementia who are much older and “are completely inappropriate for people like Kelly”.

“It is thought there are more than 40,000 people under the age of 65 living in Britain with dementia but with younger people it is likely to be a rare type and it is very hard to diagnose when the number of people are so few,” she added.

Last night a spokesman for the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said “for some people the process of being diagnosed can take months or even years”.

Kelly’s family is fundraising to send her to a specialist private clinic in London, in the hope of getting a clearer dementia diagnosis. If you’d like to sponsor her log on to http://www.gofundme.com/kellydc