REMOTE MEMORY IN PATIENTS WITH ACUTE BRAIN INJURIES

Remote memory was investigated in an unselected sample of 26 patients with either unilateral rumours in the temporal lobes or traumatic brai n injuries. Six patients underwent excisions within the left temporal lobe, and nine patients were operated on within the right temporal lob e. In both groups, patients with excisions including and sparing the h ippocampal formation were studied. Their performance was compared to t hat of 11 patients with moderate to severe head trauma and to a normat ive sample of 214 healthy controls. Remote memory was assessed using a famous events test with items of extremely low salience that had been proven to be of low difficulty for those old enough at the time of th e event's actuality. The results show severely disturbed retrograde me mory functions in the left temporal tumour group. These patients achie ved similar scores to patients with severe traumatic brain injury. Rig ht hemispheric patients showed a pattern of results comparable to that of healthy controls. The strongest effects were in the free recall pa rt of the test. In most of the patients, no graded memory loss was obs ervable. No consistent association to recent memory function could be identified. Since most of the remote memory test items used denoted fa mous names which were cued by rich semantic information, the type of d eficit seen may be best understood in terms of a specific dysfunction of the semantic stores containing information about famous proper name s. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.