Abstract
A patient with a severe amnesic syndrome following a glioma of the splenium of the corpus callosum is reported. The long-term memory deficit involved anterograde as well as retrograde events dating back to 40 years and causing topographical disorientation. Short-term memory test performance was in the normal range, with the exception of tactile memory which was severely impaired. The patient also showed disconnection symptoms, due to severing of occipito-parietal and parieto-temporal connections, while parieto-parietal connections were undamaged.
Highlights
Lesions of the corpus callosum due to tumors, infarcts or surgical section cause an inter-hemispheric disconnection syndrome
Much easier to observe is the presence of an amnesic syndrome, which has sometimes been reported in patients with lesions of the corpus callosum (Mingazzini, 1922; Risak, 1926, 1930; Scharpff, 1927; De Morsier, 1932; Magri, 1935; Halpern, 1936; Waggoner and Loewenburg, 1937; Sprofkin and Sciarra, 1952; Chimanski, 1959; Co1mant and Grote, 1959; Elliott, 1969; Kretschmer, 1974), little is known about its frequency and pathogenetic mechanism
The data, are somewhat contradictory: all of the ten patients tested 4 to 9 years after surgery by Zaidel and Sperry (1974) showed verbal and spatial memory deficits, but the latter were less conspicuous in the two patients who
Summary
Lesions of the corpus callosum due to tumors, infarcts or surgical section cause an inter-hemispheric disconnection syndrome. The data, are somewhat contradictory: all of the ten patients tested 4 to 9 years after surgery by Zaidel and Sperry (1974) showed verbal and spatial memory deficits, but the latter were less conspicuous in the two patients who. A poor performance on verbal learning, independent of the extension of the callosal section and the involvement of the splenium, was reported by Gazzaniga (1975) in five patients, tested 1-2 years after the operation, while an improvement in postoperative performance as compared to pre-operative performance was found by Ledoux et al (1977) in a patient who had suffered from right temporal encephalitis and had been submitted to callosotomy. The case we report concerns a patient affected by a glioma of the splenium of the corpus callosum, who complained of a disconnection syndrome and a severe amnesic syndrome
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