66-Year-Old Man Developed Transient Global Amnesia After Getting Intimate With His Wife

A 66-year-old man suddenly got amnesia 10 minutes after having afternoon sex with his wif. Their intimate moment led him to temporarily forget the happenings the previous day and he was unable to retain new information.

The Insider reported that the man was distressed after looking at his phone and seeing the date thinking that he had forgotten his wedding anniversary when he had already celebrated it with his wife and family.

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66-Year-Old Man Developed Amnesia Postcoitus With Wife, Temporarily Wiping His Memory and Failing to Retain New Information

'Mind-Blowing' Afternoon Sex Wiped Out Man's Memory

Doctors from Limerick, Ireland, said that the memory loss of the man, who was not identified in the case report, lasted for an hour with him repeatedly asking questions to his wife and daughter over what happened in the morning and the previous day.

When he reached the emergency room and was subjected to neurological examination, doctors found that he is perfectly healthy. They diagnosed him with transient global amnesia (TGA), which causes short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories. Previous cases suggest that it could last 4 to 6 hours without the need for treatment, although some experienced it for 24 hours.

The case report says that the man also had the same experience seven years ago, indicating that TGA can happen more than once to a person at any given time.

Doctors published the case report, titled "Recurrent Postcoital Transient Global Amnesia Associated with Diffusion Restriction within the Left Hippocampus," in the Official Journal of the Irish Medical Organisation on Wednesday.

They noted that the case highlights sexual intercourse as a trigger to TGA and the importance of MRI to identify changes in mesial temporal lobes, which includes the hippocampus, amygdala, and parahippocampal regions. These brain regions are crucial for episodic and spatial memory that processes encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.

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About Transient Global Amnesia

TGA is anterograde and retrograde amnesia with sudden onset and lasts up to 24 hours, according to MSD Manual. Doctors usually diagnose patients after a series of neurological examinations, including laboratory tests, and CT and MRI scans. The amnesia could recur and there is no way to tell how frequent it will be.

About 75% of cases of TGA occur in people aged 50-70 and rarely occur in people aged 40. The etiology of the amnesia is still unclear, although suggested mechanisms may include hypoxia, migraine, venous flow abnormalities, seizures, and even psychological factors.

Sexual intercourse is seen as one of the triggers of TGA along with sudden immersion in cold or hot water, physical exertion, emotional or psychological stress, pain, medical procedures, and the breathing method called the Valsalva maneuver. However, many cases of TGA do not identify any trigger.

Patients who often present a triggering event and experienced an abrupt onset of severe anterograde amnesia or inability to form new memories could be a symptom of TGA. They are often disoriented to time and place but can still identify themselves.

A lot of cases also present patients being anxious, agitated and repeatedly questioning the events that had happened. The impairments usually resolve without treatment as the episode subsides.

In cases where benign TGA is caused after substance ingestion, it is usually retrograde or the inability to recall past memories. It does not cause confusion and recurs only if similar amounts of the same drug are ingested.

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