A patient comes to a doctor's office complaining of memory difficulty. List three possible reasons for the patient's memory problem. Compare and contrast the possibilities you choose.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Memory loss can occur because of Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, and mild cognitive impairment, among other causes. In Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative process causes parts of the brain to fail, leading to memory loss and other problems. Because the medial temporal lobes are areas that are damaged early, the person develops difficulty forming new memories. Because the parietal lobes are also affected, people develop problems with spatial processing and may also have problems using language correctly and problems making learned skilled movements. The symptoms come on gradually and worsen over time.In vascular dementia, memory loss occurs from strokes in the brain. In addition to memory problems, the patients may have other neuropsychological problems. The nature of these other problems depends on what brain areas happen to have been damaged by stroke. The problems usually start suddenly and may progress suddenly again if and when another stroke occurs. Because the medial temporal lobes are not necessarily affected, unlike in Alzheimer's disease, patients with vascular dementia will forget new information, but they can often be helped to recall that information with recognition cues.In mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a person does not have dementia, which is defined as a loss of memory, as well as a loss in another neuropsychological domain, that causes problems bad enough to impair the person's ability to function at work, at home, or socially. MCI does not meet these criteria. A person may have memory loss, for example, but other neuropsychological domains remain intact, and the memory difficulty is not severe enough to impair the person's ability to function at work, at home, or socially.