Amnesia

What is Amnesia?

Amnesia is a particular case of forgetting and refers to pathological loss of the ability to acquire or recall information. It includes psychogenic amnesia, posttraumatic amnesia. Also, memory loss occurs along with some cognitive impairments in progressive degenerative neurological disorders and isolated memory loss that characterizes the syndromes of amnesia.

The Characteristics and Symptoms of Amnesia

Symptoms include specific types of memory impairment, which can be severe enough to dramatically impair a person's quality of life. Specifically, anterograde amnesia is a certain disorder that prevents patients from explicitly learning information. In addition, retrograde amnesia is mean that some patients have trouble remembering information from the past. While other cognitive functions remain intact, the sufferer is temporarily unable to form new memories (anterograde amnesia), retrieve established memories (retrograde amnesia), or both.

Fig.1 Classification of mammalian long-term memory systems. (Squire, 2009)

Etiologies of Amnesia

Amnesia results from various etiologies that cause damage to brain regions. Physical causes typically result from three types of circumstances. The first reason is related to medical conditions often resulting from, but not limited to, physical trauma to the brain. The second cause of amnestic disorder is due to metabolic damage to the brain, such as closed head injury. A third cause is other diseases such as psychogenic amnesia and transient ischemic attacks.

Although amnesia has a psychogenic origin, the focus is on organic amnesia due to structural brain damage. For example, diencephalic amnesia arises from damage to structures that make up the diencephalon, particularly the mammillary bodies, the anterior thalamic nuclei, the mammillothalamic tract, and the medial dorsal thalamic nucleus. A range of vascular, infectious, and traumatic disease processes can cause such lesions. Due to infarction of the paramedian arteries, Thalamic strokes can also lead to significant memory loss.

Current Research Directions

In the classic case, the cognitive deficits of patients are specific to long-term memory: general intelligence, perception, reasoning, and language functions are spared. Although there is no effective treatment for these amnesia diseases, recent advances have examined various prevention strategies and some possible treatments. Some newly identified drug candidates have been investigated with efficacy and safety in some animal models. Before they are appropriate for humans with amnestic disorders, many extensive drug tests are still required.

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Reference

1. Squire, L. R.; et al. Amnesia: Declarative and Nondeclarative Memory. Concise Encyclopedia of Brain and Language. 2009, 30-35.