Transient epileptic amnesia - Wikipedia

Transient epileptic amnesia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a rare but probably underdiagnosed neurological condition which manifests as relatively brief and generally recurring episodes of amnesia caused by underlying temporal lobe epilepsy.^[1] Though descriptions of the condition are based on fewer than 100 cases published in the medical literature,^[2] and the largest single study to date included 50 people with TEA,^[3][4] TEA offers considerable theoretical significance as competing theories of human memory attempt to reconcile its implications.^[5]

Contents

• 1 Symptoms
• 2 Diagnosis
• 3 Neuroimaging during events
• 4 TEA and other transient amnestic syndromes
• 5 Epidemiology
• 6 Persistent memory effects
  • 6.1 Accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF)
  • 6.2 Remote memory loss
  • 6.3 Topographical amnesia
• 7 Treatment
• 8 Implications for theories of memory
• 9 External links
• 10 References

Symptoms

A person experiencing a TEA episode has very little short-term memory, so that there is profound difficulty remembering events in the past few minutes (anterograde amnesia), or of events in the hours prior to the onset of the attack, and even memories of important events in recent years may not be accessible during the amnestic event (retrograde amnesia).^[6] Some people report short-lived retrograde amnesia so deep that they do not recognize their home or family members, though personal identity is preserved.^[7] The amnestic attack has a sudden onset. Three-fourths of cases are reported upon awakening. In attacks that begin when an individual is fully alert, olfactory hallucinations or a "strange taste"^[3] or nausea have been reported. Somewhat less than half the cases include olfactory or gustatory hallucinations, and slightly more than a third involve motor automatisms. A quarter of attacks involve a brief period of unresponsiveness.^[4] Frequently, however, there is no warning.