Characteristics Of Emotional Memory In Patients With Thalamic Infarction

Objective There are a large number of round-trip neural connections between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex and limbic system.Now many studies have shown that the thalamus and memory are closely related.Our study used different valence pictures to investigate the emotional memory impairment in patients with thalamic infarction(TI)on different laterals and healthy controls(HC),and explore the impact of different emotional valence pictures on the TI patients' memory and the neurobiological mechanisms undellying.Subject and methods 28 TI patients were selected from November 2015 to December 2016 hospitalized in the neurology department(TI group)and 28 healthy controls(control group)were evaluated by the background of neuropsychological test,and using positive,neutral and negative emotional pictures to evaluate the change of emotional memory.Results There was no significant difference in age,sex,education,MMSE,HAMA and HAMD scores between TI group and HC group(p>0.05),while the difference between the two groups in VFT,DS and CTT scores were statistically significant(p<0.05).At the stage of evaluating emotional images,the positive emotion picture recognition results in group TI and group HC were [HC(12.50±1.67),while TI group(11.75±2.07)]no significant difference(p>0.05).But compared with control group(neutral(12.96±1.62)and negative(13.57±1.37),respectively),patients with TI(neutral(10.79±2.07)and negative(10.96±2.05),respectively)showed evident differences in neutral and negative evaluation(p<0.05).At the stage of emotional images memorizing tests,TI group's scores on re-accessing total emotional pictures were significantly lower than those in control group [(36.14 ± 3.24)vs(41.89 ± 3.43)respectively)](p<0.05).Compared with control group [positive(14.04±1.29)and neutral(13.68±1.56)],patients with TI[positive(10.93±1.96)and neutral(11.25±1.67)] had visibly deteriorated in the emotional pictures memorizing tests.The difference was statistically significant(p<0.05).But there were no evident difference(p>0.05)in negative stimulus between them(control group:(14.18±1.25),TI group:(13.89±1.37).Further research found that compared with RTI(37.86±1.83),patients with LTI(34.43±3.48)showed evident decline in emotional pictures recognition(p<0.05).In addition,the difference between the two groups in the recognition of neutral pictures was statistically significant(p<0.05),which was [LTI group:(10.43±1.55);group RTI:(12.07±1.38)].Conclusions Thalamus not only assist in the evaluation of the emotion,but also impact the processing of the emotional memorization,suggested by the fact that neutral and negative emotional memory evaluation and positive and neutral emotional memory memorization were impaired,but negative emotional memory were reserved.This result indicates that the impact of TI on the emotional memorization process of different valence is dependent on different neuromechanism.In patients with LTI,negative emotional memory and total emotional memory impairment were more severe than RTI,suggesting that the severity of emotional memory impairment was different in patients with different lateral thalamic infarction,indicating that the left thalamus may have greater impact on memory.