Hidden home problem left ‘perfectly healthy’ 37-year-old woman with dementia

An Australian woman has revealed how a secret mold infestation in her Sydney home led her to being diagnosed with dementia and even forgetting her own name.

The constant wet weather that has plagued Australia’s east coast over the past 18 months means many residents are now acutely aware of just how quickly mold can take hold in the home – and how difficult it can be to get rid of.

While most people understand that mold is detrimental to our health, it is hard to know just how much of an impact it can have until you experience it first-hand.

Amie Skilton is one of the 25 percent of the Australian population that has a genetic vulnerability to mold toxins, meaning exposure to mold sets off a huge inflammatory response in her body and can even lead to organ damage.

However, the 42-year-old only found this out five years ago following a horrific experience with a moldy apartment in Manly.

Skilton, then 37, moved into the apartment in 2016 with her now-husband.

At the time she was “perfectly healthy”, having just completed a 9km fun run, been in the US twice to speak at two conferences and delivering 39 keynote addresses in the six months prior to moving in.

“My brain was fine and my body was fine,” Skilton, who works as a naturopath and nutritionist, told news.com.au.

What she and her partner didn’t know was that the waterproofing in the shower was messed up during a recent renovation and, as a result, water was leaking under the carpet and through the apartment every time it was used.

“I started getting sick, noticeably sick, about two months in,” she explained.

“It may have taken that long just because it was over summer and it was really sunny, we always had the windows open and we never registered that there was a leak at all.”

The result of the secret mold problem was a “systematic breakdown” of Skilton’s body.

“The first symptom that I noticed were allergies, chronic allergies, and I put on like 10 kilos out of nowhere,” she said.

“I’m also a nutritionist and literally been the same weight my whole life. I put on 10 kilos in a matter of months and had really bad fatigue.”

Over the course of a few months her brain functions also started to decline.

She had trouble focusing and working and, when she was in the depths of her illness, she was referred to a neurologist who diagnosed her with type three Alzheimer’s disease, also known as inhalational Alzheimer’s.

As it progressed, simple things like leaving the house would become an arduous task because she would forget where her keys were and once she found them an hour later she would have misplaced her phone.

“Some days I couldn’t figure out how to get dressed. I would look at clothes and I just be really confused as to like how to put them on,” she said.

Skilton had a Vespa that she would ride down to the local shops, but while she was out she would forget where she parked and when she finally found her bike the keys would be in the ignition.

But the scariest symptom she had was the day she couldn’t recall her own name.

“I went fill out a form one day and I was staring at the box that said my name and I was like what is it again? I was staring at it, searching for it,” she said, describing the horror of forgetting something so “deeply personal”.

Because she and the doctors she was seeing didn’t know of the growing mold problem in her house, all the tests they did were coming back fine.

She said mold-related afflictions are one of those conditions that not many health professionals are trained in, meaning most people end up being diagnosed with things like chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia because they have similar symptoms.

She said normal blood tests aren’t enough to show what is actually wrong.

“This is exactly what happened. Everything came back fine, white blood cell counts fine, red blood cell counts were fine,” Skilton said, adding most doctors brushed her off and told her there was nothing wrong with her.

‘Under the carpet there was all this black mold’

Skilton said there were a few serendipitous things that happened at the same time to make her realize that her home could be the cause of all her problems.

For some people, it can take years to be diagnosed, but for her it happened in a matter of months.

She first started realizing something was really wrong in February 2017 and by May, the penny had dropped.

What first tipped her off was an online post from one of her friends explaining how her husband had the mold gene and…