RETROGRADE AMNESIA: What is it, Symptoms, Causes and Treatment

Not being able to remember. Family, friends, loved ones or that anecdote that you always liked to tell. Sometimes accidents or horrible situations happen that completely change how you perceive the world and how you remember it. People with retrograde amnesia have the inability to remember parts of their past due to accidents, head injuries, illnesses or traumatic events, among others. Is amnesia absolute? What exactly is retrograde amnesia? This article from Psychology-Online: Retrograde amnesia: what is it, symptoms, causes and treatment aims to get a glimpse of this disturbing memory loss.

Index

1. What is amnesia?
2. What is retrograde amnesia
3. Symptoms of retrograde amnesia
4. Retrograde amnesia: causes and types
5. Retrograde amnesia: treatment
6. Cases of retrograde amnesia

Amnesia is a impaired memory function. As we know, memory is a very important cognitive function that is responsible for encoding, saving and retrieving information that we have learned in the past. If you want to know if you have a good memory, you can do the

We will therefore speak of amnesia when it is seen impaired ability to retain or retrieve memories. There are two main types of amnesia: anterograde and retrograde, we will focus on the latter in this article.

The retrograde amnesia is a neuropsychological syndrome of memory that involves that of loss of memories or the inability to reach them. This involvement usually occurs after brain injury or disease and can occur in conjunction with anterograde amnesia.

In general, retrograde amnesia affects declarative or explicit memory, that is, all memory that can be expressed in words. This amnesia affects, above all, in episodic memory, which is defined as the memory of events, places and past emotions and in autobiographical memory, which is linked to specific events in the affected person's personal life. Within declarative memory there is also semantic memory, which is memory related to the knowledge and meaning of words or concepts, this is sometimes affected by amnesia retrograde.

Instead, implicit or instrumental memory, which is the memory that reflects the learning of skills or motor skills, such as playing the piano or riding a bike, are usually preserved in cases of amnesia retrograde.

Gravity from retrograde amnesia

The severity of retrograde amnesia is not always the same. Amnesia itself can last minutes or hours if the injury was minor. In more serious situations the loss of memories can become permanent.

Regarding the lost information, in most cases, the memories that are lost are from the last events of the life of the person before the incident that caused it, which can revolve around the last hours or the last days. On other occasions, memories of remote memory are lost, with the possibility of losing the sense of identity of the person who suffers from it.

Difference between retrograde and antegrade amnesia

What is the difference between retrograde and antegrade amnesia? Retrograde and anterograde amnesia are different in terms of the area of ​​memory that it affects, as well as the origin that causes it, although sometimes they can share the same cause.

• The retrograde amnesia is the loss of previous memories to the incident that caused it.
• The anterograde amnesia is the inability to generate new memories after the incident.

The symptoms of retrograde amnesia are memory loss or difficulty accessing memories. As previously mentioned, retrograde amnesia limits the recovery of memories in the following areas:

• Episodic memory. More concrete memories of past events experienced, emotions or places that have been are lost. An example would be not being able to remember that it was done on a specific weekend or day.
• Autobiographical memory. You can forget memories of personal experiences such as the day of your wedding, the adventures of a vacation or in more serious cases memories of childhood.
• Semantic memory. They forget names of cities, ideas or how to say some words.

In addition, it usually occurs in conjunction with antegrade memory.

The causes of retrograde amnesia are different factors. However, the vast majority of cases of retrograde amnesia are caused by lesions in the thalamus, hippocampus, or cortical and subcortical structures that are related to memory.

Damages are usually caused by head trauma, brain infection, substance abuse and some dementias among other causes. Depending on the cause of retrograde amnesia and the severity of it, there are different kinds of retrograde amnesia. Next, we will see the types of retrograde amnesia and the cause of each:

Gradually classified retrograde amnesia

This type of retrograde amnesia usually occurs with anterograde amnesia and has a gradual component in severity. Remote memory is usually preserved while recent memory is what is affected.

Patients with gradual retrograde amnesia they usually recover their memories after a while. This is because the injuries to brain structures have not been very serious and connections with memories have been recovered thanks to brain plasticity.

Gradual retrograde amnesia may be worse if it is due to conditions such as Alzheimer disease or Wernicke's syndrome, whose memories can disappear until they reach forgotten decades before the affectation.

Focal or pure retrograde amnesia

This condition is characterized by the lack of anterograde amnesia or to describe functional amnesia, that is, it does not present visible physical lesions. It is used, above all, to describe patients who do not have cognitive impairment beyond amnesia.

Normally, this type of amnesia is due to an injury to the thalamus, a structure highly related to the retrieval of information already established in the cerebral cortex from its connection with structures related to memory.

TOmnesia global

It is often referred to as global amnesia when they occur both kind of amnesia, both retrograde and antegrade.

There is a variant called transient global amnesia, which would present as global amnesia but has a short duration. In these cases, the patients seem to have lapses of absolute confusion and cannot be located in space and time. This type of amnesia is usually caused by lack of blood flow to the brain or situations of extreme anxiety among others.

TOpsychogenic mnesia

Psychogenic amnesia is that which is caused by factors of psychological origin, without the presence of any neuronal injury or alteration. The cause of this type of amnesia is due to the presence of traumatic events or having been subjected to a high level of stress that makes them unable to remember the situation that caused these events. Therefore, it can be called post-traumatic amnesia.

Here various professionals adjudge that it is not so much the ability to retrieve information that has been altered, but rather that the senior Stress levels in traumatic moments have interfered with the ability to encode and process information so that it can later be stored.

ICD10 code of retrograde amnesia The answer is not that simple. Amnesia is a complex condition with many possible causes and, therefore, with many different therapeutic approaches. Many of the causes correspond to organic origins and, therefore, the psychological work behind them is often the evaluation of amnesia herself, to know what characteristics and severity she presents.

The form of evaluation also presents difficulties. Typically, an Autobiographical Memory Interview is used, which includes names of relatives, information personal and work history, to determine whether a person is experiencing retrograde amnesia and the degree of severity. But since there is no exact way to verify that the information provided by the patient is true, it is difficult to determine to what extent and which memories she has lost.

Which is the treatment for retrograde amnesia? There are treatments that try to facilitate the recall of some memories from counting experiences that the affected person has lived and that they do not remember, but they do not usually provide effect. Most of the times that a person recovers their memories it is from the natural recovery of the injury from brain plasticity.

We can see two examples of retrograde amnesia in the cinema:

• Every day of my life (2012). In this movie inspired by true events, a young married couple has a traffic accident. Due to a head injury, she loses her autobiographical memory of recent years. When he wakes up, he does not know her husband or remember what her current life is like.
• Secret obession (2019). In this film, the protagonist is attacked by a man who is obsessed with her. After being run over, she wakes up in the hospital and doesn't remember anything about the attack. Taking advantage of the protagonist's retrograde amnesia, the person responsible for the attack pretends to be her husband. But she, little by little, is recovering memories.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Retrograde amnesia: what is it, symptoms, causes and treatment, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.

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• Montoya, M. P. S., Lancheros, J. L. A., Gómez, J. F. O., & Carvajal-Castrillón, J. (2014). Isolated retrograde amnesia: clinical description and neuroimaging of a case. Acta Neurol Colomb, 30(3), 215-221.