Posted by SLS on February 11, 2005, at 9:27:44
High-Dose Corticosteroid Therapy Reversibly Impairs Long-Term Memory
BY Will Boggs, MD
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Feb 04 - Acute high-dose therapy with corticosteroids is associated with reversible impairment of long-term memory functions, according to a report in the January 25th issue of Neurology.
"You should know about the side effects of this therapy, and keep in mind that steroids (especially in multiple sclerosis patients) may contribute to memory impairment," Dr. Stefan Schwab from University of Heidelberg, Germany told Reuters Health.
Dr. Schwab and colleagues investigated whether high-dose glucocorticoid therapy (methylprednisolone, 500 mg IV daily for 5 days) impaired short-term memory and attentional functions and assessed recovery of memory function after cessation of therapy in 21 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 9 patients with optic neuritis. There were 33 untreated healthy controls.
Distinct long-term memory functions, including learning performance, immediate recall, and delayed recall, decreased with glucocorticoid administration, the authors report.
All but immediate recall recovered within 10 days, the report indicates, and immediate recall showed a strong trend for recovery.
Short-term memory, including tasks of alertness, divided attention, and working memory, did not differ between the treatment and control groups during the study, the researchers note.
"These findings provide further evidence that exogenous glucocorticoids specifically affect those memory functions that are dependent on hippocampal activity," the investigators conclude.
"We [advise patients] that memory function can be disturbed over a few days," Dr. Schwab said.
He added: "We [have begun] a study using functional MRI to investigate the influence of steroids on hippocampal function."
"The findings are important in indicating that a glucocorticoid therapy commonly used in clinical practice to treat neurologic inflammatory disease affects memory," write Dr. Benno Roosendaal from University of California, Irvine, and Dr. Dominique J.-F. de Quervain from University of Zurich, Switzerland in a related editorial.
"It is also important to note that recent findings indicate that glucocorticoids do not uniformly modulate memory of all kinds of information but, rather, preferentially influence the consolidation and retrieval of emotionally arousing information," they add.
Neurology 2005;64:184-185,335-337.
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