The nature of impairments of memory in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD)

- The exact nature of the memory impairment in ESRD is poorly understood.
- ESRD patients were impaired when memory required conceptual processing.
- Patients demonstrated a conceptual impairment in both visual & auditory modalities.
- Memory performance in patients was the same pre- and post-dialysis.
- Type of processing required by the task is more important than type of retrieval.

Possible impairments of memory in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, in which stimulus words were presented visually, participants were tested on conceptual or perceptual memory tasks, with retrieval being either explicit or implicit. Compared with healthy controls, ESRD patients were impaired when memory required conceptual but not when it required perceptual processing, regardless of whether retrieval was explicit or implicit. An impairment of conceptual implicit memory (priming) in the ESRD group represented a previously unreported deficit compared to healthy aging. There were no significant differences between pre- and immediate post-dialysis memory performance in ESRD patients on any of the tasks. In Experiment 2, in which presentation was auditory, patients again performed worse than controls on an explicit conceptual memory task. We conclude that the type of processing required by the task (conceptual vs. perceptual) is more important than the type of retrieval (explicit vs. implicit) in memory failures in ESRD patients, perhaps because temporal brain regions are more susceptible to the effects of the illness than are posterior regions.