”This looks like a movie”: a case report of post-surgical amnesia

ABSTRACT

A 52-year-old male patient with a background of adaptive personality disorder was admitted for mitral valve repair and cardiac ablation for atrial fibrillation. He suffered intraoperative complications with severe mitral insufficiency that suffered ischemia.. Post-operatively, he demonstrated acute loss of retrograde autobiographical memory, prosopagnosia and a loss of public semantic memory. His CT scan was normal and MRI was not possible due to intra-cardiac leads. An initial diagnosis of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy was considered. A neuropsychological examination undertaken 20 days after his surgery showed a severe alteration of retrograde autobiographical memory, marked alteration of semantic knowledge and prosopagnosia. He demonstrated an average performance in tasks measuring constructional praxis, visuospatial ability, and executive functions. 34 days after surgery, and after a short nap, the patient “returns” to the day before admission and consequently recovers his memory. Repeat neuropsychological assessment demonstrated performance within the normal range across all previously tested domains. This sudden recovery of memory, together with a normal MRI, led to a rethinking of the diagnosis of dissociative amnesia. This case illustrates the long-standing discussion about the organic or functional origin of some memory disorders, in which, despite advances in neuroimaging techniques, it is still difficult to know their etiology    

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• surgery
• cognition
• neuropsychology
• dissociative amnesia

Acknowledgments

We thank the patient and family for their support in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [AP]. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participant.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.