The damage may result from a cranial trauma (a blow to the head), a cerebrovascular accident or stroke(a burst artery in the brain), a tumour (if it presses against part of the brain), hypoxia (lack of oxygen in the brain), certain kinds of encephalitis, chronic alcoholism, etc. It usually results from damage to the brain regions most closely associated with declarative (and particularly episodic) memory, such as the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex. For example, damage to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas of the brain, which are specifically linked to speech production and language information, would probably cause language-related memory loss. Retrograde amnesia usually follows damage to areas of the brain other than the hippocampus (the part of the brain involved in encoding new memories), because already existing long-term memories are stored in the neurons and synapses of various different brain regions. The British musician Clive Wearing suffers from an acute and long-lasting case of both anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia. The famous anterograde amnesia case is known as "H.M." also suffered moderate retrograde amnesia, and could not remember most events in the year or two before surgery, nor some events up to 11 years before. Nobody, was a man, in his late twenties and with a slight Yorkshire English accent but no other identification, who awoke in a Toronto hospital in 1999 with what appeared to be severe retrograde or global amnesia.Īfter various attempts to obtain Canadian citizenship and to legally change his name, he turned out to be a Romanian called Sywalkd Skeid, and to exhibit no clinical evidence of amnesia at all. "Philip Staufen" (actually the name of a medieval German king, but it was the first name the man came up with when he woke up), also known as Mr. Perhaps the best-known example of retrograde amnesia actually turned out to be a scam. 7:269-282, 2001).Retrograde amnesia is a form of amnesia where someone is unable to recall events that occurred before the development of the amnesia, even though they may be able to encode and memorize new things that occur after the onset. Fujiwara that was published in 2001 in Neurocase (Fast K, Fujiwara E: Isolated Retrograde Amnesia. If you're interested in reading further about isolated retrograde amnesia, I would recommend an article on the topic written by Dr. The fact that the character in the movie who was injured was able to go back to law school and consolidate memory moving forward clearly suggests that she had an isolated retrograde type of amnesia. I think that in many cases, clinicians do not make a distinction in the types of amnesia following TBI.Consequently, some of these patients will be treated for a neurogenic (originating in the body’s nerve tissue), condition when they may not have one and in some cases their condition will be labeled as psychogenic, when in fact, the disorder is neurogenic however, as I mentioned, this latter scenario is rare. There have been rare cases reported of organically based dense retrograde amnesia where the individual cannot remember people in their lives before the injury or even autobiographical information however, in practice most of these cases, based on both the scientific literature and my experience, are either psychogenic (originating in the mind) amnesias or malingered amnesias. She did not have anterograde amnesia (a loss of the ability to create new memories after the injury). Based on your description it seems that the woman in the movie had a dense retrograde amnesia (a loss of access to events that occurred, or information that was learned, before the injury) but was able to consolidate memory moving forward. I have not seen the movie but from what I have heard and what you described, the situation certainly sounds unusual.
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