Memory Loss After Drinking Alcohol: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

If you start the night by taking shots, chugging beer or playing drinking games, the odds of remembering everything the next day drop drastically. Often, symptoms stop progressing and even improve after you stop drinking. But in some cases, your care team may prescribe medication like rivastigmine or memantine, which are typically used for managing Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. All of the information gathered during the diagnostic process will also help them rule out other types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia. The brains of participants who were drinking three units of alcohol a day over the previous month had reductions in both white and gray matter, making their brains appear three and a half years older.

• Many people who join the abstinence movement and want to quit alcohol don’t fall within these parameters.
• John C. Umhau, MD, MPH, CPE is board-certified in addiction medicine and preventative medicine.
• People tend to either be a happy drunk or a sad and angry drunk, and there is a direct relationship between alcohol and aggression.
• In older alcoholic subjects, practicing helped increase their cognitive functioning, even on tests that would have revealed impairment for a much longer time if they had not practiced.
• You may also get a brain scan to rule out other potential conditions, like stroke, tumor, or a brain bleed caused by physical trauma.

If a person with the condition has a brain scan, it will often show that some areas of the brain have shrunk much more than others. If you’re unable to control how much you drink, avoid drinking altogether. If you have experienced a blackout before, you’re likely at a higher risk for blacking out in the future and should exercise caution.

What are the symptoms of alcohol-related dementia?

That is why people experience a range of memory loss symptoms when they binge-drink. Alcohol can cause minor memory loss, such as being unable to remember details of a conversation after a few drinks, or major memory loss, such as forgetting hours of time after taking shots. Finally, facilitating the alcoholics’ cognitive recovery using experience-dependent procedures may help reduce the risk of relapse.

If you are a single woman who has suffered a blackout, or maybe several when out socialising, and doesn’t remember getting home, this can put you at significant risk of harm. Are these the type of memories that you find yourself wanting to find? Trying to remember blackout memories and not being able to can be confusing and frightening.

Why Does Alcohol Cause Memory Loss

For example, two recent reports on a patient-treatment matching study (Cooney et al. 1991; Kadden et al. 1989) provide somewhat unintended evidence for the importance of matching treatment complexity to patients’ cognitive resources. Perhaps this result is not so surprising, however, when the large amount of information that can ptsd cause blackouts must be acquired during coping skills training is compared with the considerably lighter informational demands of interactional therapy. Two to 3 weeks after alcoholics stop drinking, they show considerable recovery in most verbal processing cognitive functions; these areas may even return to normal functioning levels.

• These symptoms can include denial, lack of insight and being impulsive.
• The symptoms of alcohol-related ‘dementia’ can change a lot from person to person.
• They also note that there could be an interaction between the effect of sleep and the effect of alcohol, as the second recall test was done the following morning, after a night’s sleep.
• Unfortunately, the most frequent common denominator of cognitive impairment, including that which results from alcoholism, is the lessening of adaptability and flexibility.

This way, the effects of practice on the tests can be separated from recovery that occurs over time. If at the first test, group two performs better than group one, then time-dependent recovery is evident. Repeat testings are necessary to ensure that differences between the supposedly matched groups are not the result of unintended discrepancies between the groups (e.g., differences in premorbid intelligence). The difference in the rate of improvement between the alcoholics and the nonalcoholics is then an indication of the “true” recovery of cognitive functioning. Over time, excessive drinking can lead to mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. Alcohol abuse can increase your risk for some cancers as well as severe, and potentially permanent, brain damage.

Recognizing and Treating Alcohol-Related Dementia

Drunk driving, unprotected sexual activity, crime, and violence are to be expected of those that have a blood alcohol content level high enough to induce memory lapse. Also, those that commonly experience memory blackouts from alcohol are at a higher risk of using other drugs and developing other addictions. Goldman and colleagues (1987; 1990) investigated whether other experience-dependent strategies to induce recovery might be superior to simple repetitive practice. Although subjects recovered after this strategy beyond what they would have with no training, the strategy was no better than simple practice.