Hippocampal stroke

Abstract

The first to link disturbance of memory and lesions of the medial temporal lobe was the Russian neurologist von Bechterew, who in 1989 presented the brain of a 60-year-old man who had suffered from severe amnesia. Autopsy showed bilateral damage of the medial temporal lobe. Several following postmortem case studies confirmed the association between permanent amnesia and bitemporal stroke. Reports of transient memory deficits in unilateral stroke in combination with other neurological and neuropsychological deficits followed. With the advent of brain imaging, persistent or transient amnesia as the sole or primary manifestation of acute - mostly left-sided - hippocampal stroke was described. With the use of modern MRI techniques the identification of typical ischemic stroke lesion patterns affecting the hippocampus has become possible. Although overt cognitive deficits in unilateral hippocampal stroke seem to be rare, a careful neuropsychological examination might be necessary to detect resulting neuropsychological deficits including disturbances of verbal and nonverbal episodic long-term memory and spatial orientation.