Transient epileptic amnesia: deja vu heralding recovery of lost memories

Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy in which the main and sometimes only manifestation of the seizure is a period of amnesia, usually lasting less than 1 h, during which other cognitive functions remain intact. Attacks are frequent, often occur on waking and typically respond promptly to anticonvulsants. Patients with TEA often complain of persistent interictal remote memory impairment and accelerated forgetting of new information.1 Deja vu is the disconcerting feeling that our current experience echoes some ill-defined past experience.2 Deja vu can be subdivided into a form related to the processing of familiarity, true deja vu and a form related to the processing of recollection, “deja vecu” (“already lived”).3 Many healthy people experience deja vu occasionally, and it is sometimes a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy.2 However, in a recent study, no patients with TEA reported clear-cut deja vu in relation to their amnestic seizures.1 This could relate to the fact that deja vu is more prevalent in younger people while TEA is a late onset disorder or to the pathophysiology of amnestic seizures. We report a patient with TEA who experienced episodes of deja vu approximately 5 years after cessation of his amnestic attacks. After these episodes, he recovered …