• Question: How far back can you lose your memory?

    Asked by anon-188124 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 9 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 9 Nov 2018: last edited 9 Nov 2018 1:49 pm

      Hi thanks for your question. Sadly, you can potentially lose all of it under some circumstances. Some horrible diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, are marked by severe brain deterioration and memory loss. In the later stages of this disease people with it will not be able to remember anything, including their loved ones and own children. This is why it is really important to work on finding a cure, or at the very least ways of understanding the disease and making sure people get the care they need. This is all really important work, so it is a good job we have lots of excellent scientists like Nadine on the case.

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      I think Alex provided already perfect answer – we can in fact lose “all of our memory”, especially in Alzheimer’s disease, to the point that we no longer remember who out close ones are, who we are (!) and related with the disorder is the loss of ability to move and support one’s functioning (remembering to eat, etc.). It’s a horrifying disorder. To add further to Alex’s response – it is also important to try to *early screen* people in whom the dieases is onsetting . We have recently published a paper showing that we can use a simple audiovisual detection task to detect people who have the symptomes of mild cognitive impairment, have a look at a short article in ScienceDaily about it as well as the scientific article of ours:

      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180620125958.htm
      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-27288-2.pdf

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