Page 101 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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depression did not return. She left treatment feeling happy, taking with her my instruction that she
should call me if her depressive symptoms started to recur in the future.

How Depression Causes Memory Loss

Joan complained about memory loss even though her symptoms were caused by depression. In other
words, memory loss masked her clinical depression, for which treatment was successful. Therefore,
if you have begun to experience memory loss and you also feel down or blue (or lack all feelings)
most of the time, depression may be the source of your memory problems. Depression itself may be
related to stresses and traumatic events in your life, but sometimes depressive illness can strike for
no apparent reason. This type of depression is likely to be due to abnormal chemical
neurotransmission in the brain, which can be treated successfully with medications, as Joan
Marciano discovered.

What If Memory Loss Persists after Depression Improves?

In some people with both depression and memory loss, the memory deficit may not improve even
after the depression is successfully treated. In such a situation, the memory loss that accompanies
depression may be the first sign of Alzheimer's disease. We showed this in a community study of
elderly subjects, where the presence of depression conferred a threefold increased risk of developing
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Alzheimer's disease during a follow-up period of up to five years. George Alexopoulos's research
group at Cornell reported similar results in hospitalized patients who had both depression and
cognitive deficits.

These results seem to run counter to the notion that memory loss is part of the depressive illness
itself. The age distribution of the patients in Alexopoulos's and my studies provides a partial solution
to this riddle. Our studies were conducted in people who were all more than sixty-five years old, with
an average age in the seventy-five-to-eighty-year range. The findings probably do not apply to
people in their forties and fifties, as illustrated by Joan Marciano's complete recovery from both
depression and memory loss.

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