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New hope for people with memory loss

Elianne Parent was on her way to celebrate her 18th birthday with friends when a drunk driver smashed into their car.

Elianne Parent was on her way to celebrate her 18th birthday with friends when a drunk driver smashed into their car.

She suffered a severe traumatic brain injury and drifted in and out of a coma for two months. When she finally emerged, it was as if the first 18 years of her life had melted into the huge pool of liquid that had claimed a large area in the right hemisphere of her brain.

She didn’t recognize her mother, father or brother and had no recollection of her childhood near Montreal. She remembered nothing of her boyfriend, her studies, the hot dogs she and her friends had barbecued before going go-carting and then to the bar that May evening nearly three years ago.

She had a rare case of total retrograde amnesia, as well as serious difficulty processing new memories and information. While she slowly came to know her family, she often couldn’t recall events that occurred even 15 minutes earlier.

Now, thanks to an experimental treatment being tested at Laval University in Quebec City, Can. her ability to store and access new memories has dramatically improved. She’s even had a few glimpses of her life before the accident.

“Some were about my ex-boyfriend, although I had others as well. It was the first time I remembered anything about my life before the accident. They felt real,” said Parent, who will turn 21 in May.

She no longer needs to be reintroduced to someone she met half an hour earlier, as she did the day she first encountered Cyril Schneider, the researcher she has been working with. The case holds out the tantalizing prospect that new treatments could improve a patient’s quality of life even years after a brain injury or stroke.

Parent had already come a long way by the time she met Schneider in April of last year.

During two years of intensive rehabilitation, the determined young woman learned how to walk again, and to feed and dress herself. A former competitive cyclist, she even got back on a bike, albeit one with training wheels. But the past continued to elude her.

The family was told that the “official” rehab was over, but her mother, Jocelyne Parent, was determined to help her daughter continue to improve.

An acquaintance told her about Schneider, a neurophysiologist at Laval who is investigating whether stimulating the brain with repetitive, precise magnetic signals can help stroke patients overcome some kinds of brain damage, even years later. He agreed to work with Elianne. She has made rapid progress.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation influences the activity of brain cells, either by firing them up or calming them down, with a device that sends a painless magnetic signal through the skull.

The prefrontal cortex on the right side of Parent’s brain had been badly damaged. Her right ventricle had expanded to engulf the cells, causing tissue to die.

There is growing evidence that memories are stored by the left hemisphere but retrieved by the right, and Schneider had a hunch his patient was still encoding memories. Perhaps, with the right stimulation, he could jump-start the retrieval process.

He and his colleagues came up with a modest treatment plan that would require giving the right side of Parent’s brain a repetitive, intermittent magnetic signal in a 10-minute session once a week for 10 weeks. They tested her ability to form new memories after each session by asking her to remember as many words as she could from a different list each week.

At the start, she could recall two or three words. But by the fourth week, her accuracy was 69 per cent; by the 10th week, it was 100 per cent.