Hi
Which damaged parts of the brain give rise to amnesia in long-term and short-term memory? I read that the hippocampus is responsible for both long-term and short=term memory or is it only responsible for certain aspects of long-term and short-term memory? I’m not sure. I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
The hippocampus is very important, as you noted. Other limbic structures of the brain are also important. Specifically, the mammillary bodies, mammillo-thalamic tracts, and the thalami are critical.
These can be damaged in cases of severe thiamine deficiency.
Thanks Blue Blistering Barnacle. The wikipedia link you attached focuses on Wernicke’s encephalopathy and WKS is most commonly seen in alcoholic patients. What I was able to gather from it is that "
"The retrograde deficit has been demonstrated through an inability of WKS patients to recall or recognize information for recent public events. The anterograde memory loss is demonstrated through deficits in tasks that involve encoding and then recalling lists of words and faces, as well as semantic learning tasks. ".Retrograde amnesia is seen in patients with a damaged temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex, often from cranial trauma (a blow to the head)
I’m particularly interested in the case of Scott Bolzen (see links)
http://mytruestory.com/story/166
Memory ‘loss’ is hi$ gain (disputes Bolzan’s claim)
Does Bolzan have a strong case?
Supporting Bolzan’s Claim:
"Retrograde amnesia is the loss of memory of information acquired before injury, according to Margaret O’Connor, director of neuropsychology at the Center for Cognitive Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and a professor at Harvard Medical School…Retrograde amnesia occurs after damage to the medial temporal lobe or encephalitis, and has fascinated doctors for more than a century. In its “purest form,” there is dense memory loss, but the patient continues to have intelligence and reasoning, as well as language function, according to O’Connor.
"Medical experts also say that people with retrograde amnesia cannot recover their memory simply by being told the events of their life by others.
"
Disputing Bolzan’s Cliam:
“Bolzan, CEO of an Arizona private-jet leasing company, claims that in 2008 he fell in his office bathroom, sustaining a head injury that caused permanent retrograde amnesia, or long-term memory loss. He didn’t recognize his wife and kids, called the TV a “picture box,” and forgot his own name.”…
“Not knowing what a TV is, not knowing what a cellphone is, this is all inconsistent with any known form of brain damage,” added Dr. Joel Morgan, an expert in medical malingering…"
“Total autobiographical loss is “automatically a red flag for considering a severe personality disorder or a plain-vanilla malin-gerer,” said Dr. Manfred Greif-fenstein, a neuropsychologist who has not examined Bolzan.”
“What made Bolzan’s claims unusual from the start was its violation of bedrock principles: Old memories are more resistant to brain damage than fresh ones,” said Greiffenstein. “But here we see the opposite — well-established memories wiped out, but recent memory preserved.”
If these experts can’t figure him out, I doubt I can.
Drs. Laurel & Hardy recommend hitting him on the head again. Drs Rubble and Flintstone concur.
For more movie insights, I recommend “Memento”.
I didn’t read all your accounts, but I agree that his amnesia pattern is more typical of soap operas than medical journals. If there is really significant secondary gain, there are reasons to be suspicious. The ABC story seems to accept his statements uncritically, yet even it notes that he developed “fake” seizures 18 months after his fall (described as a maladaptive coping mechanism in the story). I am not a psychiatrist nor a neurologist, but I expect that seizures and amnesia must be very popular items among malingerers.
On the other hand, a temporal lobe injury could definitely cause memory problems, and not every brain is organized the same way, so specific deficit patterns may vary among individuals, even with similar injuries. Lined up against his story are A) an expert in medical malingering, and B) a neurologist who hasn’t examined him. I’m not sure where you go to get special expertise in “Malingerology”, but I will point out that HIS secondary gain is to identify malingerers (“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).
The hippocampus is involved in laying down new memories (learning). Long term memory is integrated through many structures and connections through the brain, mostly deep inside. That tends to protect memory from loss.
Seems odd that he can’t remember what a television is but he remembers what an " oily substance" is. Who uses an oily substance to clean a restroom floor, anyway? He also seems to remember what $$$ is, what a lawsuit is…
I lost patience with the first article - did he have a CT or MRI? It should show some pretty significant damage if the damage is real. As a football player, he may have had multiple head injuries, but the resulting syndrome is more like Alzheimer’s disease, with remote memory retained.
As you can see, I am more in the “malingering” camp.
For an interesting case of (real) memory loss, this article was in the New Yorker early this year:
An Artist with Amnesia - The New Yorker
Lonni Sue Johnson can’t remember what happened five minutes ago. What can she teach scientists about memory and the brain? Daniel Zalewski reports.
When this lady first left the hospital, her family took her to her house and she didn’t recognise it - she said “is this my house?”, when they showed her her airplane, she said “I can fly a plane???”
The difference is, she knows what a house is, and what a plane is.
The rapid onset of various mental illnesses suggest that auto-immune (antibodies then cause synapse polution or neuron malfunction ) could occur due to any injury that prompted the production of those antibodies…
However it is not yet exactly clear how Lou Gehrig, Alzteimers, MS and all the motor neuron diseases come about. MS comes and goes in some sufferers suggesting that it is somewhat moderated… perhaps some persistent infection (if some affect the heart, then perhaps others affect the brain ? ) triggers it in some people, and in other people, a stroke or similar causes it persistently.
The clue is that Lou Gehrig syndrome (the one named that, not what Lou Gehrig actually had, that appears to have been misdiagnosed…) seems to be related to neck injury, suggesting that its rather like arthritis, the injury to the tissue caused an immune response (as if to clean up the injury… ) but then runs amock…
In summary, I am saying that the OP is asking "what would cause brain malfunction ? " ,and that can be anything like a stroke, concussion, neck arthritis, brain stem/ spinal cord lesion, or even some women go crazy when they have a ovarian cyst… the teratoma grows brain matter, which then triggers the immune system respone… which goes on to attack their real brain…
It was just last week that the ovarian cancer victim was unidentified due to amnesia “her disease produced antibodies which caused amnesia”… dead sure it was a teratoma… as the news here reported a girl with mental illness, saying "well she had other symptoms so perhaps the syndrome should have been recognized earlier… someone with no such until exposed … to HPV… ".
MS comes and goes because of the autoimmune response - insult (stress of some kind eg surgery, illness) > inflammation (immune mediated) > destruction of myelin around neurons. It runs its course, if you are lucky, and calms down again but I believe that the damage remains to some extent. Note that MS patients tend to do really well during pregnancy and then have bad relapses after they give birth, and the basis of treatment is immunosuppression.
I did not read about the ovarian cancer patient, did she develop the “mental illness” while being treated? Also, ovarian Ca is associated with paraneoplastic syndromes, many of which are neurologic and also devastating. They used to say that the paraneoplastic syndromes were the result of effective (well, sort of) treatment releasing toxic products, I don’t know that anyone says that any more.
To OP - what happened with Mr Bolzan’s lawsuit(s)? I have been looking online and hav only found the results of his disability case a few years ago. Was your interest in the case piqued by some newer legal information? Is he appealing it again?
MmeRose. I only know that Bolzan filed a lawsuit against the building owner and property manager where he fell and settled for an undisclosed sum. I came across the wikipedia link and and link advertising his book “My Life, Deleted”
“The New York Post published an article on October 9, 2011 reporting that a doctor who examined Bolzan after his fall stated that Bolzan was possibly “feigning his alleged memory deficits”, explaining that it is questionable that an injury to one part of the brain could affect all the different memories distributed among the organ, while not damaging his cognitive abilities or his ability to form new memories. The article also cited other neurologists who, while having not examined Bolzan, stated that his amnesia violates fundamental knowledge of neurobiology, in that old memories are more resistant to brain damage than recent ones, in contrast to Bolzan’s case.[13]”
“Bolzan filed a lawsuit for more than $1 million in 2009 against the building owner and property manager where he fell, claiming he could remember slipping on an “oily substance on the floor. Though the case has been sealed, Bolzan reportedly received “significantly less” than he sought because of questions raised about the fall and his amnesia, according to sources close to the case.”
Thank you, Davidmich. I wonder why some lawsuits are sealed while every tiny detail of others can be read.
I saw that he was refused Social Security Disability, appealed, and was refused again.
BOLZAN v. COLVIN | No. CV-13-01033-PHX-NVW. | 20141009757 | Leagle.com .
I also posted his case on a discussion board for physicians, I will be interested to see the responses.
Thanks for that update MmeRose
BOLZAN v. COLVIN
…“On May 2, 2012, the ALJ issued a decision that Plaintiff was not disabled within the meaning of the Social Security Act. The Appeals Council denied Plaintiff’s request for review of the hearing decision, making the ALJ’s decision the Commissioner’s final decision. On May 20, 2013, Plaintiff sought review by this Court.”
Paraneoplastic syndromes are now felt to be due to antibodies. Specific antibodies are associated with specific syndromes.
Here is a link to an emedicine page on paraneoplastic syndromes.
Here is a link to paraneoplastic encephalitis.
It has several brain images, showing abnormal “brightness” of the tissues on either side of the central “Mickey mouse” structure (the midbrain). Those brighter, damaged structures ARE the hippocampi, which lie along the medial sides of the temporal lobes.
Thank you, BlueBlisteringBarnacle. That would explain why the one patient that i met back in the day of “toxic products of chemotherapy” responded nicely, but temporarily, to plasmapheresis. She had ovarian cancer and had a cerebellar syndrome, but, thinking back, also had some odd behavior which everybody attributed to mental illness. Being kind of odd, myself, I liked her.