A 66-year-old Irish man has worried that he forgot to celebrate his wedding anniversary, after looking at the date on his phone. It turns out that the latter had been celebrated the day before… Faced with this strange, very sudden loss of memory, he went to Limerick Hospital for consultation.
The man was apparently in good health, although he had some unsurprising problems due to his age such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, and an episode of memory loss seven years earlier. The doctors realized that while he had no recollection of the celebrations the day before or of what he had done that very morning, he was quite capable of retracing his personal history. Otherwise, neurological examination was normal.
Can sex cause us to lose our memory?
In retracing recent events, doctors learned that his memory had become blurred about ten minutes after the end of sexual intercourse. Seven years earlier, just before his transient global amnesia, the Irishman had also made love there. The scientific team then formulated a supposition: his amnesia would come from there, and the MRI would not have revealed any trace of this memory loss because it would have been carried out too late. If it had been done just after coitus, it would surely have revealed a cloudy area on the side of the left mesial temporal lobe.. However, these lesions are of short duration and then leave no damage to the brain.
But how could having sex cause us to lose our memory? It would actually come as no surprise, at least at a certain age. A stroke of stress, a sudden change in temperature when immersing yourself in very hot or cold water, severe pain or significant physical effort (such as sexual intercourse!) can cause very brief memory loss in men aged 50 to 70, underline the caregivers. It can last a few hours or spread over a day, before returning to normal.
Source: Official Journal of the Irish Medical Organisation, 25 May 2022.
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