Sex amnesia
You just had the most incredible sex of your life. Only you can’t remember it. Sounds like a sick joke, but forgetting the absolutely unforgettable is a real occurrence.
Lovers have been known to blank out on entire sexual experiences, having no recollection of the event or their orgasmic responses.
What exactly is this phenomenon? And could it ever happen to you?
Sexual amnesia can happen to anyone, and most unexpectedly. Did you and your lover really have sex this morning or is your sweetie pulling your leg? Why do you have no recollection of that night of passion? What exactly happened with the hottie you brought home last night?
In many of these baffling cases, alcohol or drugs aren’t to blame. But you can point the finger at another culprit. Well-described in medical literature since 1956, transient global amnesia (TGA) is known as “recurrent coital amnesia” when it is triggered by sex. During such sudden, temporary memory loss, a person’s ability to recall recent events and new information totally disappears.
Suddenly, you can’t remember where you are or how you got there. You do know who you are, and can recognize and name the familiar, including your sexual partner (unless you just met). You just can’t remember what happened during this memory impairment and possibly anything that happened several hours before its onset.
So what brought on this state? Surprisingly, this rare, short-lived phenomenon isn’t due to a neurological condition, like epilepsy or stroke, or recent head injury. Instead, TGA is typically traced to a stressful emotional or physical event. These include:
With sex in particular, TGA is typically triggered after climax. Medical practitioners have also noticed that using the Valsalva method — a discouraged sex move involving squeezing the pelvic floor muscles while pressing down, as though having a bowel movement — precedes TGA in some males.
Sex-related or not, one thing all of these factors have in common is a sudden lack of blood flow to the brain. Brain scans indicate that blood flow to areas of the brain involving memory appears disrupted during TGA. And any time blood flow is restricted to the brain, a person’s ability to record new memory is severely impaired.
Because it cannot be distinguished from other life-threatening conditions, immediate medical attention needs to be sought when TGA strikes during or after intercourse. Dead giveaways that something is wrong include babbling, apparent confusion and repeatedly asking questions about ongoing events like “What are we doing?” or “What time of year is it?”
When asked by their partner or later by a doctor, they’re unable to correctly answer questions like “Who is the president?” or “What year is it?” Equally perplexing, however, is the fact that one’s vocabulary and movement are not impaired. There is no clouded consciousness.
Other symptoms may include headache, nausea, vomiting, anxiety, agitation, dizziness, chills, fear of dying, “pins-and-needles” sensation, trembling, sweating, visual disturbance, racing heartbeat, cold hands and feet, and great emotionality.
TGA episodes last an average of six hours (going for no more than 24 hours), with one’s memory returning gradually. Thankfully, all indicators are that a person’s memory is OK afterward, and the TGA has apparently done no damage. One’s immediate recall ability appears to be preserved.
TGA is equal opportunity when it comes to sex and race, but those over 49 are at higher risk of experiencing this sudden memory loss. Physical events tend to precipitate TGA in men, while emotional events, a history of anxiety, or pathological personality are more associated with women.
While the underlying cause is unknown, a history of migraines is a prime suspect for any individual. Experiences with migraines or coital headaches (sex headaches) have been linked to some who experience TGA.
Overall, incidence in the U.S. is 5.2 cases per 100,000 individuals. Interestingly, this is higher than incidence estimates in Alcoi, Spain, which is at 2.9 cases per 100,000, but lower than the 10 cases per 100,000 in Belluno, Italy. While the annual recurrence is low, over one’s lifetime, recurrence can be as high as 24 percent, which may work to your advantage.
After all, almost any lover is open to a good excuse when it comes to rationalizing having done anything regrettable. TGA may just be the perfect fib for that unfortunate time you forget your partner’s birthday, anniversary or seemingly most amazing sex session.
Amnesia After Sex
If President Clinton had known what a pair of Johns Hopkins doctors recently learned from two patients with a temporary form of amnesia, charges that he lied about sex might be moot.
Chi Van Dang, M.D., Ph.D., and Lawrence B. Gardner, M.D., hematologists, found that bearing down hard the way some people do when they move their bowels, deliver a baby or have sexual intercourse can produce six to 12 hours of transient global amnesia — the inability to form new memories.
Reporting in this week’s issue of The Lancet, the Hopkins team reports global amnesia in two men, ages 72 and 75, whose wives took them to the hospital half an hour or so after sex when the men became seriously confused although remaining fully conscious. In one case, the patient thought he’d had a stroke.
Instead, according to Dang and Gardner, the “bearing down” — also known in medicine as a Valsalva maneuver — along with the typical activation of the sympathetic nervous system during sex, created intense pressure in the brain’s blood vessels resulting in temporary lack of blood flow to the central part of the brain. This, in turn, resulted in amnesia.
“Interestingly,” Dang quipped, “this form of amnesia results in a complete inability to recall what happened during the period of confusion. As with our patients, who could not recall the name of the current U.S. President, a presidential Valsalva maneuver during each of his recent escapades may have legally allowed him not to recall specific events and may thereby help maintain international stability during the current transient global economic fluctuation.”
Sex, then amnesia
It was either mind-blowing or completely forgettable. Either way, Alice doesn’t remember.
One August morning, Alice and her husband, Scott, had sex.
That’s when things became confusing. Rather than appearing pleased, Alice, 59, seemed disoriented.
As they lay in bed, Scott (the couple asked that their last name not be used) flicked on the television, which was showing the Olympics. This perplexed Alice. “Is there an Olympics?” she asked. This was during the Michael Phelps mania, when the swimmer seemed to be everywhere.
“Are you sure there is an Olympics?” Alice asked again.
Scott recalled, “I saw that something was wrong, so I asked her, ‘OK what day is it?’ ”
Alice appeared even more perplexed.
“Who’s our president?” he quizzed.
“Bill Clinton,” she answered. This was 2008.
Scott darted out of bed and called 911. The paramedics suspected a stroke and rushed the befuddled Alice to the emergency room.
For decades, doctors described cases of a rare neurological condition that usually occurred in patients over age 50. Neurologists noted that patients knew their identities, but couldn’t retain recent memory, where they were and how they got there. They showed no other symptoms.
Sex is one of the major triggers for the baffling medical condition called transient global amnesia in which patients lose their ability to retain immediate memory.
TGA usually occurs after the person engages in strenuous activity — such as having sex, vigorously exercising, suddenly immersing into icy or hot water, straining to dig a stuck car or even bumping the head.
“The unifying thing about each of them is they produce a sudden and significant change in blood flow,” said Dr. Louis Caplan, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Alice arrived at the hospital around 8 a.m. in seemingly perfect health. As medical staff poked and prodded, Alice cheerfully peppered them and her husband with questions.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You’re in the ER,” Scott answered.
“How did I get here?”
“The ambulance brought you here,” he replied.
It was like a script or a tape. On the one hand, it was very funny. We were hysterical. It was scary as all hell.
–Scott
“Wow.” Alice paused for about 10 minutes, observing the hubbub at the hospital before she repeated her initial questions. At some point, she started asking different ones.
“What was I doing before this? How did I wind up here?” she inquired.
Scott told her.
“So we were…”
“Yeah,” Scott answered.
“Then this happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me get this straight. We had sex. I wind up in the hospital and I can’t remember anything?” Alice said. There was a slight pause.
“You owe me a 30-carat diamond!” Alice quipped, laughing. Within minutes, she repeated the same questions in order, delivering the punch line in the exact tone and inflection. It was always a 30-carat diamond.
“It was like a script or a tape,” Scott said. “On the one hand, it was very funny. We were hysterical. It was scary as all hell.”
While doctors tried to determine what ailed Alice, Scott and other grim-faced relatives and friends gathered at the hospital. Surrounded by anxious loved ones, Alice blithely cracked jokes (the same ones) for hours.
“Let me get this straight,” Alice said to her husband. “We had sex. I wind up in the hospital and I can’t remember anything? Was it good for you? ‘Cuz it wasn’t good for me because I couldn’t remember anything.”
“That’s the closest I came in my life to being hysterical,” Scott said. “You’re literally laughing and crying at the same time.”
Hours later, the doctors made the diagnosis. And figured out the cause.
“This is actually a well-known precipitator. One of the things people have done to look at transient global amnesia is to look at frequency of various precipitants and sex always comes out as one of the most common,” said Caplan, a leading stroke expert at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not associated with Alice’s care.
“It usually is after climax that it develops,” he said about its onset.
Patients who have a history of migraines and headaches are more likely to get TGA as some people report getting terrible head pains related to orgasms, called coital headaches.
“I remember the previous night going to sleep with a subtle headache and not taking anything for it,” Alice recalled. “And apparently, the next morning, my husband and I had intercourse. From what I found out, there was an orgasm.”
In 1999, Johns Hopkins University doctors described two patients in their 70s who suffered TGA after having sex. In these cases, the act of “bearing down” — which occurs when people move their bowels, give birth or have sex — created pressure in the brain’s blood vessels, resulting in temporary lack of blood flow that caused amnesia, according to the study published in The Lancet.
Levitra, which is a pill for erectile dysfunction, lists TGA as a possible adverse reaction.
Caplan likened the hippocampus, which is responsible for short-term memory in the brain, to a tape recorder. If blood flow to the brain gets restricted, the hippocampus cannot record new memory.
“The hippocampus is responsible for initially recording the information so you can play it back,” he said. “So if it’s not working, you won’t get the information.”
TGA usually occurs once, but in some cases, it could become recurrent. Studies that took advanced brain imaging of patients experiencing TGA showed abnormalities in the cerebral arteries in the left hippocampus of some, Caplan said.
“It’s not enough of a stimulus or deprivation that it permanently injures the brain. The brain recovers,” he said. “There should be no deficit other than memory and it should be brief.”
As the day progressed, Alice’s repetitive questions came every 10 minutes, every 15, then 30, until she regained her immediate memory. Around 2:30 p.m. that day, Alice remembers sitting on a hospital bed and seeing her husband looking upset.
Although Alice recovered fully, she still cannot remember what happened that morning. The last thing she remembered was going to bed the night before with a slight pain in the right, rear area of her head.
“I was lucky because nothing bad came of it,” said Alice, now 60. “I wasn’t frightened. My husband and family were frightened. I was totally out to lunch.”
One consequence from the amnesia was that it provided her two grown children with too much information about their parents’ sex life.
A year after her episode, Alice said the amnesia had not deterred her sex life, but she avoids having intercourse when she has a headache. She tells her husband, “So sorry, you can wait.”
And Alice has yet to receive a 30-carat diamond for all her troubles.
Sources:
www.foxnews.com
www.cnn.com
www.sciencedaily.com