Sleep Doctoring: Fatigue Amnesia in Physicians

New in the journal journal Cortex: four shocking cases of practicing medicine while exhausted  (Dharia & Zeman, 2016). The authors called this newly discovered syndrome “fatigue amnesia.” Why this is is any different from countless other examples of not remembering things you did while exhausted — I do not know. Except amnesia for performing a complex medical procedure is a lot more disturbing than forgetting you did the dishes the night before.

Here are the cases in brief:

Case 1:  A consultant geriatrician, while working as house officer, treated a patient with chest pain and severe pulmonary oedema in the middle of night. She made an entry in the notes, demonstrating successful initial memory acquisition. She does not remember going to bed that night. On the ward round on the following morning the patient was pointed out to her but she had no recollection of seeing the patient or writing the note.

Case 2: A senior house officer, now a consultant neurologist, went to bed in the early hours after a busy shift. She was woken soon afterwards to manage a patient with cardiac arrest. The resuscitation was complex and included an intracardiac adrenaline injection. She documented events in the medical notes immediately, demonstrating successful initial memory acquisition. She returned to bed. She was told on the morning ward round that the patient was well and had his breakfast following the cardiac arrest. She was startled by this information, as she had no recollection of the previous night's events.

Case 3: A consultant microbiologist who was working on a night shift as a house officer clerked in a patient at 11:00 pm and continued to work thereafter throughout the night. On the morning ward round when the patient was pointed out to her she had no recollection of seeing or managing him.

Case 4: A paediatrician reported memory loss for a complex decision made and instructions given over the phone. While working as a registrar he went to bed in the early hours of morning when on call. He was woken by a call about a complex patient. He went to the ward soon afterwards to find out that the trolley was laid out for Swan Ganz catheterisation. Although he was assured that he had done so, he did not remember giving instructions to prepare the trolley.

The incidents were not due to alcohol or drugs. Long hours and sleep deprivation were to blame. And fortunately, the amnesic episodes were isolated and did not recur in any of the doctors. Dharia & Zeman (2016) suggested that:

While the resulting memory gaps can reasonably be described as resulting from a ‘transient amnesic state', the evidence from the medical notes suggest that this phenomenon reflects a novel form of accelerated long-term forgetting (Elliott, Isaac, & Muhlert, 2014), whereby a memory for events is acquired normally but then decays more rapidly than usual.

Sleep Blogging

By tomorrow, I will have forgotten that I wrote this...


Reference

Dharia, S., & Zeman, A. (2016). Fatigue amnesia Cortex DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2016.03.001