Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Everyone complains of his memory,
and no one complains of his judgement.
François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, (1613–1680)Consider two presentations of patients that are typical of people attending memory clinics for neuropsychological assessment. Patient A was referred by her family doctor, after her husband had insisted that she had a professional opinion on her memory problems. She presented with a marked memory impairment, but enjoyed the testing session and joked about her memory not being as good as it used to be, but she was confident that she was scoring well in the formal assessments of memory. She could give no examples of her memory difficulties, and denied it was having any impact on her life. And yet, just the day before she had been upset that she could not remember her grandchildren's names, or recognise her sister. Patient B self-referred to see a community-based screening team and harangued his family doctor for a referral for formal memory assessment. He did not joke about his problems, but complained constantly that his memory was failing him. He gave detailed vignettes of recent memory failures, such as failing to lock up the house, but his scores on a range of memory assessments were well within the normal range. Detailed testing, history, and medical examination suggested that Patient A had Alzheimer's disease, and that Patient B was one of the group of clients called the “worried well.”
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.