Developmental amnesia Professor Vargha-Khadem People with this disorder have serious problems remembering everyday events and episodes in their life, but have relatively little difficulty learning factual information.

In this article

What causes it?

What are the symptoms?

What's the treatment?

Brain imaging studies have shown developmental amnesia is linked to damage to the hippocampus, a structure in the brain that's known to be closely involved in long-term memory. It has been suggested the hippocampus is especially important to the memory of single events - so-called episodic memory.

In children with developmental amnesia, the hippocampus shows a loss in volume of 40 to 60 per cent on each side of the brain. There may be no obvious abnormalities in surrounding brain regions that are also important to long-term memory.

There's good reason to believe this type of brain damage can occur as a result of loss of oxygen to the brain. This could be caused by extreme prematurity or a difficult birth, long epileptic seizures or temporary arrest of the heartbeat.

This region of the brain is particularly vulnerable to loss of oxygen and is damaged permanently.

Children with developmental amnesia are often described as forgetful and unreliable. They frequently lose their belongings, forget to deliver messages, don't keep appointments, become easily lost and have problems finding their way in new surroundings, have difficulty remembering the plot and sequence of events in a novel or film and forget activities they've carried out in school on any given day.

As children become older and more demands are placed on their memory, they become increasingly dependent on others to help them to remember. However, they are relatively able to learn new facts and information.

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust and the Institute of Child Health are working to identify the different aspects of developmental amnesia that respond to neuro-rehabilitation by implementing repetition techniques and other education-based training methods.

If you suspect your child has this type of memory problem, ask your GP or paediatrician for a referral to the neuropsychology service at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where a team of experts will be able to provide a diagnosis.

You can also write to: The Institute of Child Health, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, 30 Guilford Street, London WCIN 1EH with a full description of the memory problems. The institute will then consider whether they are appropriate for diagnostic evaluation as part of one of the research programmes.

This article was last medically reviewed by Dr Rob Hicks in January 2008