Anterograde amnesia is the loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a complete or partial inability to recall the recent past, while the long-term memories prior to the event remain intact. This is in contrast to retrograde amnesia, where memories created before the event are lost while new memories can be created.
Both can occur together in the same patient. To a large extent, it remains a mysterious ailment because the precise memory storage mechanism is still not well understood, although the regions involved are known to be certain sites in the temporal cortex, especially in the hippocampus and nearby subcortical regions..
The human brain is the great computer of our organism. It intervenes and regulates all activities: movement, language, emotions, reasoning… And memory is one of the mental functions that are organized in the brain.
Memory allows us to assimilate information, order it and retain it. I could say that memory is our reserve of the information we handle. Through it, we have the ability to place ourselves in the past, present and future scheme.
People with antegrade amniotic syndromes can have widely varying degrees of forgetfulness. Some with severe cases have a combined form of anterograde and retrograde amnesia, sometimes called global amnesia.
In the case of drug-induced amnesia, it can be short-lived and patients can recover from it. In the other case, which has been studied extensively since the early 1970s, patients often suffer permanent damage, although some recovery is possible, depending on the nature of the pathophysiology. In general, there is a certain capacity for learning, although it can be very basic. In cases of pure anterograde amnesia, patients have memories of pre- injury events, but cannot recall daily information or new events that occurred after injury.
In most cases, patients lose declarative memory or event memory, but retain non-declarative memory, often called procedural memory. For example, they may remember and in some cases learn to do things like talk on the phone or ride a bike, but they may not remember what they ate that day for lunch.
Furthermore, patients have a decreased ability to remember the temporal context in which the objects were presented. Some authors affirm that the deficit in the memory of the temporal context is more significant than the deficit in the semantic learning capacity.
The symptoms and their severity depend on the underlying cause responsible for the memory loss. The onset of symptoms can occur suddenly, without any warning signs. In cases where the condition is caused by a severe brain injury, symptoms occur once the individual regains consciousness after the accident. The patient always remembers everything before the incidents.
