Abstract
In order to investigate impaired awareness (i. e., unawareness (UA)) of patients with amnesic symptoms, we developed a self-report “Memory Questionaire” (MQ) which consisted of two forms, that is, patient's MQ with 132 items and family member's MQ with 104 items. This study focused on two problems : whether there were UA-score differences depending on diseases and lesion lateralities; whether there was a correlation between UA-scores and neuropsychological test performances, we obtained UA-scores by subtracting patients' ratings of their own amnesic symptoms from these by their family member.
Subjects were 54 patients, composed of 4 disorder groups, 20 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, 14 with cerebrovascular disease, 16 with dementia of Alzheimer type (DAT) , and 4 with degenerative brain atrophy who were not diagnosed as DAT yet. By their lesion lateralities they were classified into 3 groups, 11 patients with left hemispheric lesion, 11 with right, and 32 with bilateral/diffuse/obscure (BHL).
The results suggest that UA-scores are significantly different depending on diseases and lesion lateralities (higher UA-scores in DAT and BHL) and there is a significant correlation between UA-scores and a decline of non-verbal memory test performances and others reflecting right hemispheric damage. Consequently we conclude that unawareness is correlated with right hemispheric damage and it becomes severer if left hemispheric lesion is be involved.
