More than 3 million Americans have epilepsy. One in 10 adults will have a seizure at some point in their life, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. Once considered a young person’s disorder, people 65 and older compose the highest percentage of the 200,000 Americans diagnosed with a seizure disorder each year. The Epilepsy Foundation counts 570,000 people over 65 living with epilepsy today.
Seizure-triggered memory loss typically occurs after a seizure and can span the moments leading up to and after the event. Rarely does the memory loss encompass all autobiographical memory.
An international team of researchers, led by Britain’s Dr. Adam Zeman, recently suggested that seizure-triggered memory loss — which they called “transient epileptic amnesia” — may indicate a “distinctive epilepsy syndrome,” meaning it could be considered its own form of epilepsy.
Last year the group published findings in the Annals of Neurology detailing an 18-month study of 50 epileptic patients who had episodes of amnesia. Of the 50 patients, 40 displayed “persistent” memory difficulties, including “a loss of autobiographical memory for events extending back over 40 years.”
“We propose that transient amnesic epilepsy is a distinctive epilepsy syndrome, typically misdiagnosed . . . and associated with accelerated long-term forgetting and autobiographical amnesia,” Zeman and his colleagues said in their published report.
“The syndrome is of clinical and theoretic importance.”
The team of researchers is part of an effort called the TIME Project (The Impairment of Memory in Epilepsy).
Learn more at the project’s website: www.pms.ac.uk/time
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