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Zabar ordered an MRI scan, which highlights brain areas that have been damaged by a lack of oxygen, or “ischemia.” Inside Max’s skull, he could make out the gray, jello-like silhouettes of various brain regions. But clustered near the center were two glowing orbs of white.
Zabar was shocked. The spots were perfectly localized, on each side of the brain, to the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped region that encodes new memories. In his 20 years of treating patients with neurological problems, Zabar said, he had never seen anything like it.
That was 2012. Since then, Max’s case has turned out to be the first of an alarming cluster. In Massachusetts alone, doctors have identified 14 people with damaged hippocampi who suddenly lost the ability to form new memories — and 12 of them had a history of using heroin or other opioids.
Next week, Massachusetts public health officials will officially recognize this as a “reportable disease.” That means that for the next year, doctors will alert the state of any new cases, just as they do for infectious diseases like Ebola or Zika, in the hopes of collecting enough data to figure out how many addicts are suddenly losing their memories, and why.
Is it tainted drugs? Or an unknown side effect of the cheap and powerful heroin alternative, fentanyl? A piece of Max’s genetic makeup that made him susceptible to brain damage? Or perhaps something much simpler: a tragic, if unmysterious consequence of exposing the brain to opioids, again and again.
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