Traumatic brain injury has many cognitive side effects on the patient like inattentiveness, excessive sleeping, depression, irritation, lack of judgment and slow rate of thinking. Memory loss is another cognitive side effect of head injury that is very common in TBI patients. The intensity of memory loss is based on the severity of the traumatic brain injury.
Sometimes patients cannot remember what happened to them before they suffered from a head injury and even after that. In such cases, the memory loss can be temporary. Temporary loss of memory is caused due to swelling of some parts of the brain because of the blow received during head injury. In most cases of temporary memory loss, the memory of the patient returns after the swelling gets completely healed over a period of some time. When a traumatic brain injury affects a person, the ongoing events in the surroundings are stressful to the patient and can lead to a temporary loss of memory.
After a head injury, there can be some damage to the internal structure of the brain. The nerve cells in the brain are connected to the nervous system through axons. Damage caused to the nerves or the axons can result to a memory loss in TBI patients. This condition is called as retrograde amnesia in which patients can remember only bits and pieces of some memories or may not recall anything at all. For example, a pianist can recall what a piano is but may have forgotten how to play it after getting affected by retrograde amnesia.
There is another type of memory loss known as anterograde amnesia in which the victim cannot remember what took place after the head injury. The reason of anterograde amnesia is still unclear to doctors but research done in this field indicates that it is caused by a lack of protein. Proteins help the brain to maintain the balance of the activities that it performs. When a person is suffering from a TBI, the levels of protein in the brain are reduced so the formation of new memories is affected because the brain gets overloaded with activities.
There is no proper treatment discovered yet for memory loss after a traumatic brain injury. The memory can come back after a short time but there is also a risk that there is a permanent loss of memory in TBI patients.
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