What is the primary cause of Korsakoff's syndrome and what is one of its most distinctive symptoms?
What will be an ideal response?
Korsakoff 's syndrome, also known as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, is brain damage caused by prolonged thiamine deficiency. Severe thiamine deficiency occurs mostly in chronic alcoholics who go for weeks at a time on a diet of nothing but alcoholic beverages, lacking in vitamins. The brain needs thiamine (vitamin B1) to metabolize glucose, its primary fuel. Prolonged thiamine deficiency leads to a loss or shrinkage of neurons throughout the brain.
A distinctive symptom of Korsakoff's syndrome is confabulation, in which patients fill in memory gaps with guesses. (Some patients with other disorders also confabulate.) Most confabulated answers are more pleasant than the currently true answers (Fotopoulou, Solms, & Turnbull, 2004). That tendency may reflect the patient's attempt to maintain pleasant emotions or merely the fact that the patient's past life was, on the whole, more pleasant than the present.
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