AMNESIA

■ Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused

by brain damage, disease, or
psychological trauma.
■ Amnesia can also be caused temporarily
by the use of various sedatives and
hypnotic drug.
■ Essentially, amnesia is loss of memory.
The memory can be either wholly or
partially lost due to the extent of damage
that was caused.
 Other Causes

■ There are three generalized categories in

which amnesia could be acquired by a
person. The three categories are:
A. head trauma (example: head injuries)
B. traumatic events (example: seeing
something devastating to the mind), or
C. physical deficiencies (example: atrophy of
the hippocampus).
---Majority of amnesia and related memory
issues derive from the first two categories as
these are more common and the third could be
considered a sub category of the first.
Types
1. Retrograde amnesia is the inability
to retrieve information that was
acquired before a particular date,
usually the date of an accident or
operation.
---In some cases the memory loss can
extend back decades, while in others the
person may lose only a few months of
memory.
 Other Meaning/Description
■ Retrograde amnesia refers to inability to recall
memories before onset of amnesia. One may be able
to encode new memories after the incident.
■ Retrograde is usually caused by head trauma or brain
damage to parts of the brain besides the
hippocampus.
■ The hippocampus is responsible for encoding new
memory. Episodic memory is more likely to be
affected than semantic memory.
■ The damage is usually caused by head trauma,
cerebrovascular accident, stroke, tumor, hypoxia,
encephalitis, or chronic alcoholism.
2. Anterograde amnesia is the inability
to transfer new information from the
short-term store into the long-term
store.
People with this type of amnesia
cannot remember things for long
periods of time.
Anterograde amnesia refers to the
inability to create new memories due to
brain damage, while long-term memories
from before the event remain intact.
■ The brain damage can be caused by the effects
of long-term alcoholism, severe
malnutrition, stroke, head trauma, surgery,
Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome,
cerebrovascular events, anoxia or other
trauma.
■ The two brain regions related with this
condition are medial temporal lobe and medial
diencephalon.
■ Anterograde amnesia can't be treated with
pharmacological methods due to neuronal
loss.
■ However, treatment exists in
educating patients to define their
daily routines and after several
steps they begin to benefit from
their procedural memory.
■ Likewise, social and emotional
support is critical to improving
quality of life for anterograde
amnesia sufferers.
3. Post-traumatic amnesia is generally
due to a head injury (example: a fall, a
knock on the head).
---Traumatic amnesia is often transient, but
may be permanent or either anterograde,
retrograde, or mixed type.
---The extent of the period covered by the
amnesia is related to the degree of injury
and may give an indication of the prognosis
for recovery of other functions.
 Post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) is a state
of confusion that occurs immediately
following a traumatic brain injury in
which the injured person
is disoriented and unable to remember
events that occur after the injury.
The person may be unable to state his
or her name, where he or she is, and
what time it is. When continuous
memory returns, PTA is considered to
have resolved.
■ While PTA lasts, new events cannot be
stored in the memory. About a third of
patients with mild head injury are
reported to have "islands of memory", in
which the patient can recall only some
events.
■ During PTA, the patient's consciousness is
"clouded". Because PTA involves confusion in
addition to the memory loss typical of
amnesia, the term "post-traumatic
confusional state" has been proposed as an
alternative.
4. Dissociative amnesia results from
a psychological cause as opposed
to direct damage to the brain
caused by head injury, physical
trauma or disease, which is
known as organic amnesia.
Dissociative amnesia can include:

A. Repressed memory refers to the inability to

recall information, usually about stressful or
traumatic events in persons' lives, such as a violent
attack or disaster.
---The memory is stored in long-term memory, but
access to it is impaired because of psychological
defense mechanisms.
--Persons retain the capacity to learn new
information and there may be some later partial or
complete recovery of memory. Formerly known as
"Psychogenic Amnesia".
■ B. Dissociative fugue
(formerly psychogenic fugue) is also
known as fugue state. It is caused by
psychological trauma and is usually
temporary, unresolved and therefore may
return.
■ An individual with dissociative fugue
disorder is unaware or confused about his
or her identity and will travel in journeys
away from familiar surroundings to
discover or create new identities
■ The Merck manual defines it as " one
or more episodes of amnesia in which
patients cannot recall some or all of
their past and either lose their identity
or form a new identity.
■ The episodes, called fugues, result
from trauma or stress. Dissociative
fugue often manifests as sudden,
unexpected, purposeful travel away
from home."
■ C. Posthypnotic amnesia occurs
when events during hypnosis are
forgotten, or where past memories
are unable to be recalled. The
failure to remember those events is
induced by suggestions made
during the hypnosis.
5. Lacunar amnesia is the loss of memory
about one specific event.
6. Childhood amnesia (also known as
infantile amnesia) is the common inability to
remember events from one's own childhood.
Sigmund Freud notoriously attributed this to
sexual repression, while modern scientific
approaches generally attribute it to aspects
of brain development or developmental
psychology , including language
development, which may be why people don't
easily remember pre-language events.
7. Transient global amnesia is a well-
described medical and clinical
phenomenon. This form of amnesia is
distinct in that abnormalities in the
hippocampus can sometimes be visualized
using a special form of magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) of the brain known
as diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI).
Symptoms typically last for less than a
day and there is often no clear precipitating
factor or any other neurological deficits.
8. Source amnesia is the inability to remember
where, when or how previously learned
information has been acquired, while retaining the
factual knowledge. Source amnesia is both part of
ordinary forgetting and can be a memory disorder
caused by different factors.
--People suffering from source amnesia can also
get confused about the content of what is
remembered.
---This confusion has been loosely termed memory
distrust syndrome. Individuals who suffer from
this syndrome distrust their memory and may be
motivated to rely on external (non-self) sources.
9. Korsakoff's syndrome can result from long-
term alcoholism or malnutrition. It is caused by
brain damage due to a vitamin B1 deficiency and
will be progressive if alcohol intake and nutrition
pattern are not modified.
Korsakoff's syndrome is also known to be
connected with confabulation (creating stories). It
should be noted that the person's short-term
memory may appear to be normal, but the person
may have a difficult time attempting to recall a
past story, or with unrelated words, as well as
complicated patterns
10. Drug-induced amnesia is
intentionally caused by injection of an
amnesiac drug to help a patient forget
surgery or medical procedures, particularly
those not performed under full anesthesia ,
or likely to be particularly traumatic.
Memories of the short time-frame in
which the procedure was performed are
permanently lost or at least substantially
reduced, but once the drug wears off,
memory is no longer affected.
11. Prosopamnesia is the inability to recognize
or remember faces, even in the presence of
intact facial recognition capabilities. Both
acquired and inborn cases have been
documented.
12. Situation-Specific amnesia can arise in a
variety of circumstances (e.g., committing an
offence, child sexual abuse ) resulting in
PTSD. It has been claimed that it involves a
narrowing of consciousness with attention
focused on central perceptual details and/or
that the emotional or traumatic events are
processed differently from ordinary memories.
13. Transient epileptic amnesia is a
rare and unrecognized form of
temporal lobe epilepsy, which is
typically an episodic isolated
memory loss.
It has been recognized as a
treatment-responsive syndrome
congenial to anti-epileptic drugs.
■ 14. Hysterical (fugue) amnesia - this is
a very rare phenomenon. Patients forget
not only their past, but their very identity.
A person could wake up and suddenly not
have any sense at all of who they are -
even if they look in the mirror they do
not recognize their own reflection (the
person in the mirror is a stranger). All the
details in their wallet - driving license,
credit cards, IDs - are meaningless.
■ This type of amnesia is usually triggered
by an event that the person's mind is
unable to cope with properly. In most
cases the memory either slowly or
suddenly comes back within a few days.
■ Blackout phenomenon - amnesia
caused by about of heavy drinking.
The person cannot remember chunks
of time during his/her binge.
What are the symptoms of amnesia?

1. Uncoordinated movements, sometimes

tremors (Neurological problems).
2. Confusion or disorientation.
3. Problems with short-term memory.
4. Partial loss of memory.
5. Total loss of memory.
6. Failure to recognize faces.
7. Inability to recognize places.
Causes of neurological or
organic amnesia
a. Stroke

b. Encephalitis - brain inflammation. This can be caused by

a virus infection, such as herpes simplex (HSV), or an
autoimmune reaction to cancer in another part of the body
(paraneoplastic limbic encephalitis, PLE).

c. Celiac disease - although no clear link has been

completely agreed on. Researchers reported that
the most common reasons for seeking medical help among
patients with celiac disease were amnesia
, confusion and personality changes.
d.Oxygen deprivation - any illness or situation
which undermines the supply of oxygen to the
brain, such as a heart attack, respiratory distress, or
carbon monoxide poisoning.
e. Some medications - such as the sleeping drug,
ambien. This interesting study explains why so
many people report not remembering what they did
after taking ambien (zolpidem).
f. Subarachnoid hemorrhage - bleeding in the area
between the skull and the brain.
g. A brain tumor that lies in a memory-controlling
part of the brain.
h. Some seizure disorders.
i. ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) - also known
as electroshock therapy. This is a well
established psychiatric treatment in which
seizures are induced for therapeutic effect on
anesthetized patients. It is sometimes used for
patients with major depression whose illness
has not responded to other treatment.
ECT is also sometimes used for
treating schizophrenia, bipolar
disorder and catatonia. The memory
loss is nearly always temporary.
■

j .
Head injuries - such as
those that occur in car accidents,
can lead to memory problems.
In most cases the amnesia is not
severe and is not long-lasting.
Causes of functional or
psychogenic amnesia
■ Also known as dissociative amnesia. This is caused by an
emotional shock, such as:
■ Being the victim of a violent crime.
■ Sexual abuse.
■ Child abuse.
■ Being involved in combat (soldiers).
■ Being involved in a natural disaster.
■ Being present during a terrorist act.