If some sexual encounters leave some people with unforgettable memories, this is not the case for everyone. A 66-year-old Irishman has complained of total memory loss following having sex with his wife. How is this possible?
If some people sometimes do everything to forget regarding having sex, it immediately becomes more annoying when your partner turns out to be your wife. This unusual medical story was the subject of a case report published in theIrish Medical Journal on May 25, 2022. The patient, a perfectly healthy senior, presented to hospital in Limerick, a city located in the south of Ireland. He explains to a doctor that he forgot to celebrate his wedding anniversary the day before, ten minutes following having made love with his wife. However, he had celebrated it well with his family, and that’s not the only thing he forgot.
The trail of a retrograde amnesia
If his memory is intact, the amnesic sixty-something had completely erased the last 24 hours of his software. Faced with these worrying signs, a battery of examinations was carried out by the doctors, who however did not detect any significant neurological abnormality, nor common health problems in men of his age. Finding no other explanation for this post-coital memory loss, doctors favor the track of transient global amnesia, or TGA, according to the conclusions of the scientific journal. According to the MSD Manualit is a “sudden and temporary loss of memory for events during, following and sometimes before the event that caused the amnesia”.
The senior had already had a similar experience in 2015
This temporary black hole episode, which usually lasts between 1 to 8 hours (sometimes up to 24 hours), can be triggered during sexual intercourse, but not only. Emotional or psychological stress, sudden immersion in cold or hot water, severe pain, invasive medical procedures or even intense physical effort can be the cause of this pathology, details the world reference for medical information on his website. The senior had already experienced this phenomenon in 2015, also following sex. For information, it is a rare disease that generally affects people between the ages of 50 and 70. Those affected usually regain their memories within hours. The patient in question in this article also regained his memories following a certain period of time.
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