Im doing an I-Search paper for my Honors English 3 class, and I would like to know a little about memory loss. If you could tell me how it occurs, some treatment options, how it affects the person, and the medical reason that it happens, (such as what happens in the brain to make it forget, other than a bump on the head) would really help me. Thank you.
Welcome to the MedHelp forum!
The memory loss could just be due to concussion which at times persists for years and all of a sudden disappears and the person remembers everything. This does not have any long term complications. The person just needs support from family members and has to learn to live with the memory loss.
Memory loss is also a common symptom of frontal lobe injury. Damage to the frontal lobe of the brain causes frontal encephalomalacia. Encephalomalacia is not an illness. It is basically a softening of the brain matter as a result of an ischemia or infarction, degenerative changes, infection, craniocerebral trauma, or other injury. Thus any damage to this lobe can lead to long term memory loss. Certain types of epilepsies and seizures and sleep disturbances too cause short term memory loss along with tiredness or fatigue. Chronic infections too are known to precipitate memory loss. For this you can try yoga and meditation. Disorders of the hypothalamus, chronic fatigue syndrome and
psychiatric disorders like depression too cause similar symptoms.
To treat memory loss, you have to find the cause first. If all brain related causes (transient ischemic attack, disorders of hypothalamus, dementia and multiple sclerosis, head injury etc) are ruled out then Vit B12 deficiency, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep disorders (by sleep studies), depression, and certain types of seizures (where memory loss is the predominant symptom) should be investigated for as the cause of memory loss. Apart from sleep studies, EEG, you may need cognitive tests like mini-mental state examination (MMSE) or Folstein test. Based on the results of these tests some assignments, vitamin supplements, yoga techniques, memory games etc can be tried to improve memory.
Hope this helps. Take care!
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