Hindawi Publishing Corporation Case Reports in Psychiatry Volume 2012, Article ID 313906, 3 pages doi:10.1155/2012/313906 Case Report Emotional Memory in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Report of Two Cases Akira Okada and Junko Matsuo Department of Psychiatry, Nara Hospital, Kinki University School of Medicine, 1248-1 Otodacho, Ikoma City 630-0293, Japan Correspondence should be addressed to Akira Okada, okadada@nike.eonet.ne.jp Received 27 April 2012; Accepted 8 July 2012 Academic Editors: D. De Leo and L. Dell’Osso Copyright © 2012 A. Okada and J. Matsuo. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Highly emotional events in daily life can be preserved in memory and such memory is generally referred to as emotional memory. Some reports have demonstrated that emotional memory is also found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, to our knowledge, there have been no reports about how long memory retention for emotional events can continue in patients with AD. In this paper, we present two patients with AD who lost an immediate family member during followup and retained the memory over a long period despite progression of the AD. 1. Introduction The study of emotional memory in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) takes two general paths. The ﬁrst involves the use of photographs, words, and stories to investigate delayed recognition memory for emotional stimuli in an experi- mental setting. Several such studies have found emotional enhancement eﬀects in AD [1–3], but there is some debate over the eﬀects of emotional content on memory [4]. The second involves an investigation of the real-life experiences of patients with AD. One such study looked at experiences of the great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in Japan in 1995 [5]. The ﬁndings revealed that subjects better remembered the earthquake than a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination performed after the earthquake (mean interval of 59.2 days between the earthquake and memory survey versus 17.5 days between the MRI examination and survey). In addition, they recalled personal events during the earth- quake well but nonpersonal, factual knowledge poorly. These studies provide ﬁndings that are extremely useful to our understanding of AD, but to our knowledge, there have been no reports about how long memory retention for emotional events can continue in patients with AD. In this paper, we present two patients with AD who lost an immediate family member during followup and retained memory of the event over a long period despite progression of the AD. Both patients’ families provided verbal informed consent to publish the cases, with due consideration given to protecting the patients’ identities. 2. Case Presentation 2.1. Case 1. Case 1 was a 75-year-old woman who visited our hospital with her son due to her insistence that her bag had been stolen, but for around two years she had often misplaced her bag or purse. She had no history of psychiatric disorders. At the initial visit, no abnormal ﬁndings were found on routine blood tests, hematochemistry, or electroencephalog- raphy. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain showed no cerebrovascular damage, organic change, or strik- ing atrophy. Her mini-mental state examination (MMSE) [6] score was 20 (orientation to time 2/5, orientation to place 2/5, registration 3/3, attention and calculation 5/5, recall 1/3, naming 2/2, repetition 1/1, following commands 3/3, reading 1/1, writing 0/1, and design copy 0/1). We gave a diagnosis of stage 4 AD (mild dementia) using the functional assessment staging (FAST) tool [7]. She was started on donepezil 5 mg/day and returned for follow-up visits with her son about once a month. Just over two years (26 months) after her ﬁrst visit, she began to use