The irrelevance of mammillary body lesions in the causation of the Korsakoff amnesic state.
This discussion has been concerned with one small corner of the anatomy of memory, namely, with the role of mammillary body lesions in the causation of the Korsakoff amnesic state. Clinical-pathologic studies, both our own (of alcoholics with the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome) and those of others (in patients with thalamic infarctions and neoplasms) provide unambiguous evidence that medial thalamic lesions, without additional lesions of the mammillary bodies, are quite sufficient to produce a severe and enduring amnesic state. Behavioral abnormalities in animals, insofar as they can be equated with a defect in retentive memory, tend to substantiate the observations in humans.
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D000425:Alcohol Amnestic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D008326:Mammillary Bodies / Q000503:physiopathology*