Researchers identify the source of the debilitating memory loss in people with psychosis

As disabling as its delusions and hallucinations, psychosis’ devastating toll on memory arises from dysfunction of frontal and temporal lobe regions in the brain that rob sufferers of the ability to make associative connections, a UC Davis study has found, pinpointing potential target areas for treatments to help the more than 3.2 million Americans for whom medication quells the voices and visions, but not the struggle to remember.

The study found that memory is most impaired when people with schizophrenia try to form relationships between items—remembering to also buy eggs, milk and butter when buying flour to make pancakes—and that this relational encoding problem is accompanied by regionally specific dysfunction in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

People with schizophrenia also have greater difficulty retrieving this relational information even when they can remember the individual items, and this relational retrieval deficit is accompanied by functionally specific dysfunction in a brain area called the hippocampus. The research is published online today in JAMA Psychiatry.

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