How many of us have some memory loss?

Yes, i do forget more often.... what do i forget: my pills sometimes in sequence. But i do take 16 pills per day (other disorders), so if i am doing something else it is easy not to look into my pill container.

I have seen numerous sites on cognitive disability and hypoglycemia on the net; both Type I and II:

http://www.nil.wustl.edu/labs/hershey/db.htm

http://www.britannica.com/bps/additiona ... cts-memory

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9836525

You might like to search related key words on PubMed (the last post above).

My personal experience has been short-term memory loss and lack of cognitive focus or concentration during low blood sugar (hypo) episodes. However, I do take another med that can effect memory, and I am taking a lot of meds, which a daily routine is not always helpful.

I can't remember the last time I forgot anything :lol:

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Smidge

Seize the day! :lol:

Yep deff short term ,

[youtube]WD7Y27ud5YU[/youtube]

As most on here seem to be pushing 50 or over is it Just an Age thing ?

Or Coke :shock:

Wonderful! But it better be Diet Coke for us. Did you know that the original Coke edition had cocaine in it?

This is my first post on the forum.
I can't comment on memory loss perhaps due to my Diabetes Class 2 yet as I was only advised of this condition in December 2010 so haven't had time to really see if there has been a deterioration over and above that which arises from the Atorvastatin I taken following a heart bypass in 2008. One measurable counter to the memory loss from Atorvastatin comes from CQ10. The cardiac nurse on one of my check ups gave me a copy of a positive review of that supplement from the hospital pharmacist and I have used it since.

I will report back in say 6 months time.
Regards

Can't say I've noticed any memory problems, my partner might disagree, I am a little dozy lately though, I put the electric hob on to boil an egg and then about an hour later I smelled burning, then realised I'd left the hob on - oops! Maybe the old brain is going a little mad

MEMORY LOSS?

I have Type II, and have truly been diagnosed for over 5 years. Before this time, then I was in denial that there was anything wrong with me at all. I started to look seriously into my Diabetes just before being made redundant nearly 4 years ago. (there's another subject to blog about!)

I feel that my memory problems have been with me for over 20 years!! I have always had an extremely good long term memory. I am 51 years of age, and I clearly remember at the age of 3, listening to the assassination of JFK back in 1963. I remember ludicrous things throughout my life to the minutest detail. It's has been my day to day memory which is and has been frighteningly appalling!

At work, I could set off across the studio where I worked and get to the door and not know why I was walking that way? I would go back to my workstation, think about it, remember and set off to the door only to get to the door and think, oh no!!! I must have looked like a lunatic. I used to run around chasing my tail have the time. I think I had to work twice as hard to keep up with everyone else! My pockets were full of notes which angered my wife because she always ended up washing at least one note or another. I ended up with total paranoia because I ended up getting in a flap with everything and everyone. Little wonder I was offered redundancy?

My concentration was appalling. It is now. I am so easily distracted by just about anything. Trying to do one thing at a time is a near impossibility. I kind of write a list and haphazardly work my way through it. There is little understanding from my wife who just believes I'm strange. Part of the trouble is when I think I do remember things I am enthusiastically sure I'm always right. This has proved to be a false assumption.

I just work hard to get things right. I keep a diary, my wife's idea, and follow that. I wonder how much my diabetes has had to do with it all. My lovely old mum has dimensia and it's a little frightening to see yourself potentially going the same way.

I am mostly unemployed, a busy enough house husband you might say, I do fear getting a job because I am a bit of a liability and do not wish to make myself looked stupid, which inevitably this memory loss will do to you.

Keef - Basingstoke - 51

I pretty much have a bad memory. I somehow cant remember anything from before my early teens and feel that my memory has been affected badly. Its became very apparent this last 10 months when I have went back into education I can barely remember what I did today let along a few weeks ago.

I am type one and have been for 8 years, I had short term memory loss to some degree for about 10 years before diagnosis and this was down to calcification on the brain (a side effect from hypoparathyroidism)

But...

In June 2009 whilst on an insulin pump I had a hypo whilst I was asleep and still being pumped with insulin.

It took some time for my family to find me, and at point it was too far gone to be expected to survive.

My parents where told I wouldn't survive or be severely brain damaged (as in a vegetable)
I was in a coma for three weeks. In critical care for another two and then on a diabetes ward for another three weeks before coming home.

I really thought I had got lucky by missing out on brain damage (foolishly) but my short term memory loss got dramatically worse. I never know what day it is, and find my self asking many times a day- I often get told you have asked that eight times today.

I leave the lving room for something and by the time I pass thru the door frame I forget where I'm going. I can never remember where we parked the car( my driving licence was revoked a few months after my diagnosis because I was having anything up to 8 hypos a day and not recognising them. Now thanks to the "brain damage" I also have epilepsy so I'll never get my licence back)

I have multiple endocrine failure diseases ( forgot what I wanted to type)

The diabetes and short term memory loss have the biggest impact on my life.



Updated May 2012

What a difference a year can make,

My health has deteriorated drastically. Short term memory is bad- worse than ever.
I never know what day it is, hardly know what month it is and it is quite common that I have to ask what the year is.

When I have to go the the A&E and they ask you those questions - the ones like when people have a concussion, I fail EVERY time and I don't even have the concussion.

If I leave one room to go and get something- the second I exit one room and enter the other I immediatly forget what I have gone for. I have alarms going off, all hours day and night to check my blood, to do my insulin.

It worries me a great deal that a time will come when I won't know who I am.

I have started stuttering! I am landed with a speech impediment.
I am calling things the wrong names or my words won't come out at all
I live with my mother, she is my carer- without her I wouldn't last a week.
But it is like playing charades with her trying to find out what something is called or what words I am trying to get out.
On mothers day I wished my mother 'happy new year!'

I am forgetting to eat- which is the worst thing a diabetic can do.
I am twitching, a hand- foot-shoulder- but sometimes I feel like my whole body lifts off the bed.

I am also on different epilepsy meds, the other ones made me put on over a stone and a half.
I am having seizures, seeing a neurologist and on the meds but they won't come out and say I am epileptic.

I am also having the odd hallucination, the last one- I was adamant I was hypo but I was 13.9.
I walked out of my bedroom and saw this black shelving unit on the landing- we never owned this black shelving unit.
I went into my mothers room, when I came out it was gone.
I went hysterical, convinced I was hypo and the meter was wrong I began testing on several meters- all saying I was about 13.

All this is down to brain damage I sustained during a bad hypo when I was connected to an insulin pump and asleep.
That hypo will be three years ago on June 14th, my brain has recovered a great deal- but the damage could still be coming to light for decades.

My life hasn't been the same since.

Jane.

I'm very sorry to read of your ordeal with hypoglycemia and memory loss. But, you now write so well and you have overcome it. The brain seems to have some kind of "plasticity" so that the damage can be reversed with relatively small destruction of short-term memory. It is not like Alzheimer's, for example. Did you get any information from your doctors about what the factors were that made your mental status so precarious?

One of my fears is nightime hypoglycemia (I did post a question some time ago here about that). I think that being T2 is not as dangerous as T1. What I do is take a snack before going to bed, though it would be nice to know exactly what bg number is safe to fall asleep on and avoid long term effects. And this practice is a risk/benefit one -- too high and you risk long-term complications if repeated, and too low, you risk the kind of situations you went through.

Cheers and congratulations

When I was 18 I started having bad hypos in the night (about 4 a year).This went on for about 5 years. I wasn't aware they had happened until I woke up in the morning hardly able to move. I found that I started to find it difficult to remember things from a few weeks before the hypos occurred. I went from getting A's at school to getting D's in less than 6 months. I just couldn't remember any of the work. The worst time was when I was at work and couldn't add up a small handful of money (about 5 coins). My manager would ask me to do things and I would forget immediately. Now I have trouble spelling, finding words and putting a sentence together, things that were so easy before they hypos occured.
The worst thing is that people keep telling me to get a good job because I'm 'clever'. I can't get through to them that I can now barely remember last week and its really upsetting. The diabetes team told me that if I had any concentration/memory problems from hypos that it would be more severe/noticeable but I've spent years hiding it/avoiding people so that I don't look stupid

Even as a child I had problems memorizing things like poems/songs, important dates and/or names in history. Geography was another gray area for me. It is every hard for me to remember peoples names whom I meet for the first time and I have to ask them a few times until I remember or I have to write it down.

I have been diabetic for about two years now and have only had one hypo, at least I think it was a hypo anyway, but still sometimes I seem to struggle to find the right word or replace a word with something that sounds like the word I meant to use. An example is when the gas safety engineer was here a few days ago, I was trying to explain something to him and used the word "compensation" instead of "condensation". When I do make such mistakes I just carry on as if nothing has happened but my red face must tell a funny story. :lol:

Funny enough though, I still remember a lot of things I did/said or things that happened 40 years ago. :?

Hi. how interesting! have short term memory loss, probably due to the drug preglabalin for my neuropathy in my feet as have noticed if I stop taking it , memory improves in a couple of days, it is however a phsycotic drug n does make me quite foggy in head! Plus have recently been put on simvastatin 40mg last month so am unsure if that has any bearing on my foggy brain? Am type 2 poorly controlled despite victoza 1.8 dosage , am seeing consultant 1st june to discuss my high blood sugar readings. [they want me on insulin levemir] am so not keen . Anna.

Hi there,
My dad is 58 and has had diabetes since he was 19. Only over the past couple of years have I noticed his short term memory deterioration. He will forget dates, events and little bits and bobs but he refuses to write things down as that (in his mind) is admitting its a problem.
His reactions are a lot lot slower aswel. In conversation he seems to take a while before he answers and seems to respond and notice things a few seconds after everyone else.

Kelly

Hi All
I had memory lost while on statin, I couldnt even remember if I had eating lunch that day or what had happened the day before, it was very frightening so I booked through my Doctor to have a brain scan. He never mentioned that statin can cause memory lost in some people, so I did my own research and found that it can. Once I stopped taking statin I was back to normal. Julie