A case of frontal network amnesia

A serial study of regional cerebral blood flow deficits in patients with left anterior thalamic infarction: Anatomical and neuropsychological correlates

“…There are also reports suggesting that phonemic fluency defects are more strongly related to frontal lesions, and that temporal damage is associated with a larger deficit in semantic fluency [27,28]. Our SPM results showed a more widely decreased rCBF in the left frontal and parietal lobes than that in the temporal lobe; This finding suggests that the anterior thalamic lesion is more closely associated with numerous frontal connections than the temporal lobe [2,23].…”

“…The apathy, executive dysfunction and dysnomia observed in our patients may have been caused by the left dorsolateral frontal lobe dysfunction that was due to the disruption of the thalamo-cortical connections [2,23]. There are some reports showing that a perfusion decrease in the left dorsolateral prefrontal lobe was observed on SPECT in those patients who had left thalamic lesions [24,25].…”

“…Therefore, damage to the thalamus, and especially to the left anterior thalamic nucleus that serves as the gateway to the memory engram, has been reported to be associated with a variety of neuropsychological dysfunctions, as well as with strategic infarct dementia [1][2][3][4][5].…”

The neurobiology of thalamic amnesia: Contributions of medial thalamus and prefrontal cortex to delayed conditional discrimination

“…Contrary evidence has come from several well-studied amnesic cases of WKS with medial thalamic pathology largely sparing MD and with substantial damage to the mammillary bodies, mammillothalamic tracts, and anterior nuclei (Gold and Squire, 2006;Mair et al, 1979;Mayes et al, 1988). Studies of thalamic amnesia resulting from stroke or trauma has also provided conflicting evidence with some cases where the primary pathology appears to involve MD and adjacent medial thalamic nuclei (Gold and Squire, 2006;von Cramon et al, 1985;Squire et al, 1989;Tanji et al, 2003) and others where the primary pathology is ascribed to the mammillothalamic tracts or anterior nuclei or damage to both medial and anterior thalamic systems (Aggleton and Brown, 1999;Carlesimo et al, 2011;Krill and Harper, 2012;Pergola and Suchan, 2013;van der Werf et al, 2003).…”

Severe Amnesic Syndrome and Collecting Behavior After Surgery for Craniopharyngioma

“…His recall was impaired only for recent life. 8 However, there is almost no doubt that retrograde memory was preserved, because the recent life questions in the AMI consist of almost premorbid episodes, and additionally he sometimes recalled a traffic accident which had occurred 2 months before the surgery. Procedural memory was examined with the Tower of Hanoi test, which revealed normal procedural learning, although he had no recall of the task.…”