What is the name of the disease when a person forgets everything?

Memorizing information and the ability to retain data for a certain period of time is one of the most important cognitive functions. Some diseases provoke the development of a condition where you forget everything. Memory impairment is one of the common complaints of patients who consult a neurologist. Cognitive disorders predominantly develop in old age. However, some diseases and conditions, for example, injuries in the skull area, impaired cerebral blood flow in an acute form, chronic cerebral ischemia, are accompanied by similar symptoms in patients of any age.

Alzheimer's disease or just old age? How does dementia develop?

We are accustomed to the fact that with age people inevitably develop some health problems, and they are taken for granted.
That's why it often happens in many families that a grandparent's mental health gradually deteriorates over many years, but no one thinks to see a doctor. When it turns out that the violations have already gone far and time has been lost, the patient’s relatives are sincerely surprised: “We attributed everything to age.” And even many doctors, in response to complaints from a seventy-year-old man about memory loss, answer: “What do you want? It's age."

There is also a stereotype that it is natural to be depressed in old age. It is believed that “old age is not a joy” and an elderly person is characterized by apathy, sadness and “tired of life.”

In fact, constant depression and unwillingness to live are not the norm for any age. These are symptoms of a disorder called depression, and it is treated with special medications - antidepressants.

The table describes conditions that can be considered normal for older people and those that indicate illness.

How to recognize dementia

It is very important to recognize painful manifestations as early as possible, take a closer look at your family, and consult a doctor as soon as possible if problems are discovered. Timely treatment will help extend the years of decent life for our loved ones.

“I’m not old, but I constantly forget everything”: normal or a sign of illness?

Currently, the concept of “senile insanity” has been completely revised. Memory impairment is no longer considered to be the province of the elderly and is generally in no way associated with age. If a person has memory or attention problems, if this interferes with his daily activities, if he feels “foggy in his head” for no apparent reason, this is due to illness, but not to age.

Complaints about memory loss in young people are not so uncommon when visiting a neurologist. Regardless of age, a person may experience difficulty solving everyday problems. However, age dictates certain features in the examination algorithm for such patients. Let's try to figure out what to do with various complaints such as “cloudy head”, decreased performance, difficulties remembering and making decisions in young people.

Subjective cognitive impairment is most often detected in youth. This means that the patient notices them, but the doctor, even if he uses the most sensitive tests, does not. Despite the fact that modern science does not allow us to determine with certainty the presence of subjective cognitive impairments, they can bring a lot of trouble to a young person. For example, creating difficulties when doing everyday work, solving routine tasks, planning and implementing plans. In other words, the person feels “kind of dumb,” and the doctor tells him that everything is fine. Then they start studying forums, buying nootropics and dietary supplements from different sites, drinking caffeine-containing drinks and trying to “improve cerebral circulation” using an impressive list of drugs offered by the domestic pharmaceutical industry and unknown to anyone abroad. This is a typical but flawed strategy.

Because subjective and mild cognitive impairment do not only exist in the patient’s imagination. This is a real problem that is difficult to detect using tests. Diagnosis is complicated by the fact that difficulties in remembering and learning are sometimes present or not. The patient notices that his memory is not good, comparing himself some time ago and now.

If the patient is, for example, a nuclear physicist working by profession, it is very likely that his cognitive abilities were above average before the deterioration. Therefore, the cognitive reserve helps him cope with work and school, although he does not feel entirely confident. At the same time, colleagues and, especially, doctors will notice some alarming signs only at a serious stage of the development of the disease - the stage of moderate cognitive impairment, but not mild or, especially, subjective.

Another problem that is well felt by the patient, but difficult to explain to the doctor, is a decrease in tolerance to mental stress. This means that the person copes with his work as before. He just needs more time and effort. Which is very annoying, but cannot be detected through testing or other research.

In some cases, the matter ends with the transition of mild cognitive impairment to moderate, and then to severe. The end of the story is sad - dementia. This happens with the early onset of neurodegenerative diseases, one of which is, for example, Alzheimer's disease. Alas, it occurs not only in old people.

But still, more often the “culprits” of “cloudy head”, difficulties when trying to concentrate and the inability to carry out any kind of mental work for a long time in young people turn out to be other reasons.

Depression

Complaints of absent-mindedness, decreased motivation and apathy are often signs of depression or neurotic disorders due to stress. Memory problems are usually accompanied in such cases by feelings of anxiety, sleep disturbances and appetite disturbances. With neurotic disorders, attention is often distracted, difficulty switching from one task to another, and the inability to concentrate on one thing.

Another complaint is “slow thinking,” when thoughts get stuck like flies in jam, and it becomes absolutely impossible to plan and carry out even the simplest tasks. Anxiety disorders cause absent-mindedness due to the fact that restless thoughts “drain” mental resources, deplete cognitive abilities and quickly provoke a feeling of fatigue. And they are also a typical cause of memory loss in young people.

Treatment – selection of medications from a psychiatrist or neurologist depending on the severity of the mental disorder. In mild to moderate cases, when there are no thoughts of suicide and you manage to somehow cope with everyday activities, you can contact a neurologist.

Chronic diseases

Low thyroid function, or hypothyroidism, often masquerades as depression. Moreover, antidepressants help partially solve the problem of constant drowsiness and low mood. However, visiting an endocrinologist and checking thyroid function is a mandatory part of the examination program for a young patient who complains of memory loss.

Patients with diabetes often complain of memory problems. They need to be especially scrupulous in matters of a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid the transition of mild cognitive impairment to moderate (and this is not the limit, dementia in careless diabetics is generally a common story): control blood sugar and blood pressure levels, do not forget about feasible physical activity and maximum limiting refined foods. People with high blood pressure who do not take the pills prescribed by the doctor are another vulnerable category.

In each case, treatment will be aimed at the cause of the disease. Although in our country they like to treat memory loss in diabetics with a variety of “vascular” medications, the first priority is to normalize blood glucose levels. Constantly taking appropriate medications, daily physical activity and a balanced diet work much better than a whole complex of “drips for blood vessels”.

Lack of motivation

One of my patients really wanted to move to Paris in the foreseeable future. However, he was not good at French. He simply could not bring himself to learn at least a dozen new words every day, and the grammar textbook made him yawn paroxysmally. Neuropsychological testing showed no abnormalities. But a confidential conversation helped reveal a complete lack of motivation. The man was sure that it was “time for him to leave,” but why, for what purpose and how, he could not say.

Lack of motivation is not a disease. If you don’t solve the problem, but just beat around the bush, there will be no result. The same applies to being unable to drive when you have enrolled in driving school but are not attending classes. Or when you complain about unfinished tasks because you dozed off until the evening listening to a Scandinavian TV series. Motivation cannot be obtained with the help of a neurologist, nootropics or a magic wand. It is given out by the brain only when the task promises to be pleasant and useful. If you yourself do not believe in your dream, then it is unlikely that it will ever come true.

When forgetfulness is normal

We should not forget that the human brain is not a multitasking smartphone. Therefore, it is normal to experience difficulties with memory and attention when under severe stress or fatigue, as well as to feel slightly dull after several hours in a stuffy room. It's also normal to forget the name of someone you just met, especially if your attention is distracted by something else. It's normal to sometimes walk from one room to another and think for a minute about what you wanted to do. This cannot be called cognitive impairment; these are minor bugs of attention and working memory that are common to everyone.

However, if you have a persistent feeling that your brain seems to be working at half capacity, that it takes more time to solve habitual tasks, and that your enthusiasm seems to have completely disappeared, it makes sense to consult a doctor. It’s better to start with a therapist and with the simplest tests. Sometimes, already at this stage, it is possible to find out that the cause of memory deterioration is high blood pressure, or anemia, or vitamin D deficiency.

In any case, taking nootropics is unlikely to help solve the problem. Because complaints about memory loss are a nonspecific symptom, and each situation requires an analysis of the circumstances and an individual approach.

What is dementia

Dementia is the loss of cognitive, or, as experts say, cognitive abilities, that is, memory, attention, speech, spatial orientation and others. With dementia, cognitive abilities are permanently impaired, that is, we are not talking about a temporary deterioration in mental state, as, for example, during an acute illness.

Some decline in memory for recent events is natural in old age, and this phenomenon is called benign forgetfulness. When impairment reaches the level of dementia, people have difficulty performing everyday tasks that were previously easy. If normally a person can make his forgetfulness noticeable only to him, then with dementia the changes are visible first to close people, and then to everyone around him.

Memory loss and loss of everyday skills are not normal at any age. It is always the result of illness or injury.

How to recognize dementia in the early stages: test

With different types of dementia, symptoms may vary and appear in different sequences. Typically, dementia in Alzheimer's disease develops gradually, and often loved ones have difficulty remembering when the patient first began to experience changes. Most often, a doctor is consulted at a time when it is no longer possible to slow down the process and the few medications that can improve the condition no longer work.

A person is likely to develop dementia if:

he constantly loses important things: keys, documents, etc.;
puts things in completely unusual places;
suspects that lost items are stolen, cannot be dissuaded;
asks the same thing over and over again, forgetting the answer;
has difficulty navigating on the street;
makes serious mistakes in things that used to be easy (for example, filling out receipts).

Even one of the listed signs is a reason to consult a neurologist or psychiatrist.

On the Internet you can find many tests that are used to evaluate your own cognitive abilities. One of the simplest and most reliable is the task of drawing a clock. A person is asked to draw from memory a round dial with all the numbers and hands so that they show a certain time, for example, four hours and thirty minutes.

A healthy person can easily cope with this task. With the development of dementia, errors in this test begin to appear very early: for example, “mirror” arrangement of numbers, numbers 13, 14 on the dial, etc. Usually, by this time, problems that may alarm relatives are already noticeable in everyday life. There is no need to wait for them to disappear: the sooner you see a doctor, the more treatment options your loved one will have.

From stroke to diabetes: why does memory deteriorate?

As you know, human memory is divided into short-term and long-term. Short-term memory (also called primary or active memory) can hold a small amount of information for a short period of time. Let's say, if you need to remember a phone number, your brain uses short-term memory, and within a minute you will safely forget this number. Long-term memory is part of the subconscious and is capable of storing much more information, potentially indefinitely - throughout life.

“Long-term memory is the repository of our knowledge, skills and abilities. Its deterioration can be a consequence of many reasons: from domestic (lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, lack of routine, improper planning of the day, smoking), psychological (stress, depression, neuroses, overwork) to organic, metabolic and degenerative (head injury, dementia, etc. ),” lists neurologist “SM-Clinic”
Yulia Levchenko
.

You should worry about this if memory problems interfere with everyday life, work, and reduce the quality of life. In this case, there is a reason to consult a doctor to determine the cause and prescribe treatment, she advises.

“The fact that we sometimes cannot remember the name of a simple object or a famous actor is not a sign of dementia. And for elderly and senile people, mild memory loss is not a pathology at all. One of the early signs of dementia is a problem with short-term memory rather than long-term memory. This is manifested by increased forgetfulness about current events,” emphasizes Levchenko.

Memory disorder is often a consequence of heart problems, notes Nadezhda Bezemskaya, laboratory diagnostics doctor at the International Network of Independent Clinical Diagnostic Laboratories CITILAB.

Due to a malfunction of the heart (for example, during a stroke), the brain begins to lack oxygen, hence memory problems.

“The cause can be identified using laboratory tests. If there is a suspicion of heart disease, an analysis is carried out to determine the amount of the enzyme creatine phosphokinase in the body (CPK) and its fraction MB (from the English muscle - muscle and brain - brain). The level of CPK and its component CF allows the doctor to judge the root cause of pain in the heart area and the degree of tissue damage, and, as a consequence, the disruption of oxygen supply to the brain,” explains the doctor.

Also, damage to the kidney and liver tissue, diabetes and lack of vitamins can lead to memory impairment.

“If renal and hepatic failure is suspected, hepatic and renal biochemical markers are taken - creatinine, urea AST, ALT, GGTP. Decreased memory can also be caused by the so-called glucose starvation of the brain, this is due to a decrease in glucose levels, especially in diabetes mellitus. In this case, monitoring the level of glucose and glycated hemoglobin helps to identify not only the primary disease, but also to stop the consequences of diabetes,” says Bezemskaya.

Lack of vitamins B12 and folic acid also leads to memory problems. Memory deterioration also occurs with hypothyroidism, which is characterized by insufficient concentrations of thyroid hormones. To exclude or, on the contrary, confirm this disease, first of all, an analysis of thyroid hormones is carried out.

“Memory deterioration and failures are a very complex and multifaceted process of disorders in the human body,” says Nadezhda Bezemskaya. “With this symptom, it is necessary not only to observe and examine, for example, the level of vitamins, but also to look for the root cause under the supervision of a qualified doctor.”

How does dementia develop?

Most often, it begins with a decrease in memory for recent events: a person begins to forget about important agreements. Errors appear in complex matters: cash payments, equipment management. Suddenly it turns out that a person can no longer learn anything new, for example, when changing a washing machine, he does not remember the new way to turn it on. Over time, only old, well-learned knowledge remains in memory, then they begin to be lost - from newer to older.

The sensitivity of a person with dementia to changes in environment and inability to tolerate changes become noticeable. Sometimes signs of the disease clearly appear after the death of a spouse. Such a sharp deterioration may be associated not only with grief and depression, but also with the need to completely rebuild the way of life and take on tasks that were previously performed by the spouse.

Gradually, the patient loses everyday skills, and orientation in space and time is the first to suffer. At first it becomes difficult to navigate in completely unfamiliar places, then a person can get lost even next to his own home.

It is understandable for a pensioner to be wrong by one day in the number or day of the week, but with dementia a person even names the month and year incorrectly. It becomes difficult to determine the time using a watch; many people “confuse day with night”: waking up after a nap, they decide that it is already morning.

Gradually, difficulties appear with planning the simplest actions: the patient cannot prepare food, dress, tie shoelaces, wash, or brush his teeth. In the later stages, even such seemingly obvious skills as recognizing objects and walking are “forgotten.”

Speech is gradually lost: at first, one’s own speech becomes poor, a person forgets words, replacing them with meaningless phrases, for example, “this is the same.” Over time, the understanding of speech heard and read is also impaired, and this process is not associated with hearing impairment. If the patient does not comply with your requests, think about whether he understands what you said. Perhaps he does not recognize the meaning of individual words, or your speech is no longer a meaningful set of sounds for him.

As the disease affects the parts of the brain responsible for movement, the person becomes more and more awkward, walks with a shuffling gait, and facial expressions become poor. At the last stage of the disease, the patient forgets how to walk.

Alzheimer's disease

Aging is a natural process. And it is natural that with age a person may forget something. However, if an elderly person constantly forgets recent events, but at the same time remembers his youth well, if he is usually active and assertive, he suddenly becomes quiet, and vice versa, a previously reserved person suddenly commits many rash acts, if an extrovert suddenly begins to avoid communication even with members of his family If he loses interest in a previously very favorite hobby, one should suspect the onset of Alzheimer's disease. It is an incurable degenerative disease in which some neurons in the brain die. It is often called senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

Alzheimer's disease affects each person differently, but it also has common symptoms.

There are four stages of the disease: predementia, early dementia, moderate dementia, severe dementia.

Pre-dementia is the first, earliest symptoms of the disease, which are often not noticed, attributing them to age or stress. However, if you carefully observe a person, the disease can be recognized five years before its onset. Symptoms of pre-dementia:

inability to recall recently learned information;
inability to learn new information;
inability to concentrate;
inability to remember the meaning of any known word;
disturbance of abstract thinking;
apathy.

Of course, these manifestations do not always indicate imminent Alzheimer's disease, but it is better to contact a good specialist for examination.

For what reasons does a person forget words during a conversation?

Forgetfulness is considered to be a result of cognitive impairment. It can cause a lot of inconvenience in everyday life. If a person constantly forgets words when speaking, we may be talking about serious problems in the functioning of the brain. This situation is typical for older people, but can also occur among young people.

Scientists from different countries continue to try to unravel the phenomenon of forgetfulness. According to research, even students can forget a single word or phrase 1-2 times a week. In older people, this figure is several times higher. In 90% of cases, a person remembers the necessary information on his own, without resorting to the help of strangers.

We invite you to take a self-paced course:

Fitness for the brain

Memory can be short-term or long-term. In the first case, we are talking about recently occurring events. Long-term memory includes memories from early childhood or adolescence. As a rule, they are carefully analyzed and processed by the brain.

If a person suddenly forgets words and finds it difficult to formulate thoughts, the problem may be hidden in stressful situations. Everything returns to normal after mental recovery. Sometimes the help of medications may be required.

Scientists explain forgetfulness by the following reasons:

The brain erases unnecessary information from long-term memory.
A number of memories do not disappear, but hide in the depths of the brain. To pull them out, you need some kind of trigger - a certain smell, taste, sound or visual image.
The brain cannot remember the right word due to the lack of associations with it.
New information can displace from the brain what is no longer relevant. Sometimes the opposite happens. A person may not remember a new address for a long time, but at the same time remember the old one well.
Natural causes of forgetfulness include age-related changes in the structure of the brain. They are typical for people over 50 years of age.
Episodic interruptions in memory function can be the result of smoking or alcohol abuse. Toxic substances poison the body and destroy brain cells.
Destruction of areas of the brain responsible for memory can occur due to lack of sleep. To avoid interruptions, it is necessary to maintain a sleep and rest schedule.
Taking some medications can cause temporary memory problems.
The reason that a person forgets words when speaking is often illness. Memory impairment is possible with oncology, pressure changes and cerebral hemorrhages.

First symptoms of Alzheimer's

Short-term memory is the first to suffer. The condition when a person forgets recent information, but remembers events that happened many years ago, is typical for older people. Therefore, the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are not noticeable for some time.

Over time, forgetfulness increases. A person forgets where rooms and things are located, surprises relatives and friends by not recognizing them.

Apathy is another symptom. Interest in usual activities disappears, patients become indifferent to their appearance and condition.

Very often, patients do not understand that their behavior is caused by the development of the disease, attributing everything to fatigue and everyday stress. Because of this, diagnosing Alzheimer's early in the disease is often impossible.

Development of Alzheimer's disease

The progressive disease leads to degradation of brain functions. The person becomes completely helpless, cannot walk, sit, or eat food on his own.

Alzheimer's disease is a consequence of physiological processes occurring in the body. Its symptoms manifest themselves in varying degrees of dementia.

Predementia

This condition is usually diagnosed after Alzheimer's has progressed to the later stages. Doctors reconstruct the medical history based on the memories of relatives and the patients themselves about events that occurred (on average) 8 years ago.

Among the initial symptoms of Alzheimer's disease there is nothing special:

- impairment of short-term memory; - progressive forgetfulness; - growing need for records of everyday affairs; - decreased interest in usual activities; - increasing apathy; - desire for solitude and isolation.

Early dementia

At this stage, the increasing destruction of cells and neural connections in the brain intensifies the initial signs of the disease, forcing patients to seek medical help. New Alzheimer's symptoms appear:

What is the name of the disease in which you forget everything?

The huge amount of information that has to be processed and memorized every day requires a well-developed memory. If a disease occurs when a person forgets everything, then he has a lot of problems. Because of it, not only work suffers, but also everyday life within the home. Constantly forgetting important information can also affect your relationships with people. Therefore, such diseases should be given special attention.

A disease that causes a person to have problems remembering information is usually understood as multiple sclerosis. It is often attributed specifically to older people, but it can occur even in minors. The name of the disease is due to the fact that a person has several scattered lesions where there is damage that provokes such forgetfulness.

With sclerosis, inflammation develops in the central nervous system, after which the body begins to fight itself, destroying the myelin that forms the cells of the brain and spinal cord. As a result, memory gradually deteriorates, and nerve fibers begin to die. Most often, the disease does not appear for a long time, and then its signs begin to suddenly emerge. There are also frequent periods of remission, when the patient’s condition improves for some time.

Doctors distinguish several types of sclerosis:

clinically isolated syndrome – primary manifestations of the disease;
remitting – there is an alternation of remissions and relapses;
secondary progressive – memory impairment is constantly increasing, remissions are weak;
remitting-progressive – remissions alternate with significant relapses;
primary progressive – the disease develops continuously without remissions.

A disease in which you forget everything can be benign or malignant. In the first case, no noticeable development of sclerosis is observed for 15 years. In the second, it progresses and leads to a serious condition within 3 years.

Other illnesses can also lead to memory problems. The most common ones are: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, amnesia or dementia.

Reasons for development

The causes of cognitive impairment are associated with somatic, neurological, psychiatric diseases and conditions, which include:

Neurodegenerative, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
Vascular pathologies, including ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes, chronic ischemic processes occurring in brain tissue.
Encephalopathies of dysmetabolic origin.
Neuroinfections.
Intoxication.
Demyelinating diseases.
Injuries in the head area.
Tumor processes.
Disturbance of cerebrospinal fluid dynamics.
Pregnancy.
Depressive state, neuroses.

Most of the listed diseases are accompanied by the appearance in the medulla of numerous foci with an altered morphological structure, which leads to functional disorders in the functioning of the brain. Risk factors: old age, atherosclerotic lesions of cerebral vessels, history of arterial hypertension.

The reasons for the condition when you quickly forget everything can be associated with endocrine diseases, which are called dysmetabolic disorders and are associated with disorders such as hypothyroidism (deficiency of thyroid hormones), liver and kidney failure, and lack of B vitamins.

Memory deterioration occurs with long-term use of certain drugs. These include tricyclic antidepressants, antipsychotics (suppress mental activity, eliminate hallucinations, delusions and other symptoms of psychosis), anticholinergic drugs (used to treat parkinsonism and extrapyramidal disorders), benzodiazepines (have anticonvulsant, sedative, hypnotic, muscle relaxant effects).

Alzheimer's disease

The condition when you forget words and recently occurring events is called Alzheimer's disease, which in clinical practice is considered as the main cause of dementia in old age. The disease is characterized by progressive damage and death of neurons. In the later stages of the course, the patient loses the ability to self-care, and irreversible gross impairments of cognitive functions and behavior are observed.

Cerebrovascular pathologies

Pathologies of the circulatory system that feeds the brain occupy second place after neurodegenerative diseases among the causes of memory impairment and the development of dementia. A disease when a person forgets everything is called a disorder of cerebral blood flow, which can occur in both chronic and acute forms. The main reasons: atherosclerotic vascular damage, arterial hypertension, impaired neurohumoral regulation of vascular wall tone. Provoking factors: diabetes mellitus, history of lipid metabolism disorders.

Multiple sclerosis

One of the diseases where you don’t remember anything is called multiple sclerosis, in clinical practice it is considered as a demyelinating disease. This is an autoimmune pathological process of a chronic, progressive course, which is characterized by damage to the myelin sheath covering the nerve fibers.

Due to the destruction of the myelin sheath, which protects nerve fibers from damage and improves the transmission of nerve impulses, multifocal damage to the nervous system occurs. The disease is accompanied by neurological symptoms, including deterioration of memory and other cortical functions.

Injuries in the cranium area

Traumatic injuries to the skull and brain matter lead to disruption of brain function, which provokes memory impairment when you forget everything. In mild to moderate TBI, impairment of memory and other cortical functions predominates over other neurological symptoms.

TBIs occupy third place after vascular and neurodegenerative diseases in the total mass of pathologies that most often provoke memory impairment. Cognitive disorders develop as a result of mechanical damage to brain structures (compression, crushing) and other damaging factors - hemorrhage, edema, brain dislocation, disruption of liquor dynamics and cerebral blood flow.

Causes, signs

Old age cannot be called the cause of the development of sclerosis, even in older people. It develops due to genetic disorders, unfavorable environment, bad habits, poor diet or increased mental stress. In rare cases, the condition can be triggered by infectious diseases or a lack of vitamin D in the child. Women are more likely to experience the disease.

Symptoms may vary. It all depends on where exactly the disturbances occurred in the brain. If a person regularly forgets the next day what happened yesterday, then this can already be considered a sign of sclerosis. Along with this, other symptoms may appear.

Secondary signs of sclerosis:

muscle weakness;
increased fatigue;
decreased visual acuity;
numbness of the limbs;
dizziness;
problems with coordination;
urinary disturbance;
impotence;
epileptic seizures.

As the disease progresses, all symptoms become more pronounced. Often these are accompanied by problems with speech, decreased physical strength, decreased sensitivity of the skin, deterioration of intelligence, and urinary and fecal incontinence. The patient may sit with a face that does not express any emotions and show no interest in others, even if someone calls him.

In most cases, sclerosis is limited to simple memory impairment, combined with fatigue and periodic dizziness. Some people don’t even attach any importance to this, not thinking about visiting a doctor.

Treatment

Diseases in which memory function is impaired and you forget everything are treated taking into account the causes. Treatment at a medical center is indicated for acute disease with severe neurological symptoms or if surgical intervention is necessary, for example, to remove a tumor. Pharmaceutical drugs are used in the treatment of cognitive impairment:

Phosphodiesterase inhibitors. They expand the vascular lumen, improving the characteristics (speed, volume) of cerebral blood flow.
Calcium channel blockers. They cause relaxation of the smooth muscles of the vascular wall, which leads to expansion of the vascular lumen.
Alpha adrenergic blockers. Neutralize the effect of the neurotransmitters adrenaline and norepinephrine, which provoke a narrowing of the lumen of the vessel.
Antioxidants, correctors of metabolic processes.
GABAergic.
Peptidergic agents, amino acids.
Correctors of cellular metabolism.

Adequate therapy is possible after a comprehensive study of the patient’s health status. Elimination and prevention of progression of cortical dysfunction is carried out in a comprehensive manner. Treatment is provided for neurological and somatic diseases that are involved in the pathogenesis of the development of cognitive disorders.

Prognosis, therapy

Such an unpleasant illness, when you don’t remember anything from yesterday, creates a lot of problems. However, the prognosis for most patients is disappointing. If sclerosis progresses quickly or is not treated, then after a few years there is a high risk of becoming disabled, since the ability to move independently will be absent, and some organs will cease to function normally.

Dementia may develop, leading to dementia. With timely detection of the disease, which is immediately supplemented with high-quality therapy, there is every chance of transferring it to a mild stage with long-term remissions. But even then there will be a risk that the disease will begin to progress rapidly after many years.

The whole point of treating sclerosis is to reduce the severity of symptoms and extend periods of remission. This allows you to eliminate the onset of disability, maintain your ability to work, and also avoid serious brain damage. For this purpose, methylprednisolone, a corticosteroid, is used.

To minimize the risk of side effects, a special diet is additionally prescribed, requiring the consumption of large amounts of food that is rich in potassium. Such therapy is prohibited for hypertension, diabetes, tuberculosis, infections and ulcers. The patient may also be prescribed immunomodulators or a blood purification procedure.

Equally important is taking medications aimed at eliminating the main symptoms of the disease and providing psychological assistance. For the latter, doctors strongly recommend contacting a professional psychologist. In some cases, additional physical rehabilitation is required. It is necessary to restore the functionality of the limbs, improve fine motor skills and normalize coordination.

Everyone knows what they jokingly call a person who forgets everything. In fact, he may have serious health problems that require mandatory medical intervention. Therefore, you should be attentive to your loved ones.

You should not expect a full recovery if sclerosis develops. However, everyone has a chance to suppress the disease, transferring it to a weakened state characterized by long-term remissions. You just need to do your own treatment and follow all the recommendations of your doctor.

Diagnostics

To make an accurate diagnosis, a comprehensive examination of a person who forgets everything is carried out, after which the doctor can tell the name of the disease and how to treat it. Instrumental diagnostic methods help determine the condition of brain structures and elements of the circulatory system supplying the brain. Basic research methods:

CT, MRI.
Angiography.
Doppler ultrasound.
Electroencephalography.

To assess cognitive abilities, tests are used that involve memorizing and reproducing pictures, words, and sentences. Mental status is assessed using the Montreal (MoCa test) and other cognitive scales. A blood test shows the level of hormones and vitamins, the concentration of glucose, cholesterol and other substances.