How Does Unipolar Depression Influence Memory Encoding? —— The Role of Cognitive Support in Depression Patients

MDD often brings about numerous health challenges and disruptions, with memory loss emerging as a prominent concern.Many studies have tried to find the relationship between MDD and the patients' memory functions.Research has shown that depression affects memory encoding in a variety of significant ways.This paper analyzes research articles and relevant literature from 2000 to 2023 to connect the effects of depression to symptoms of memory loss.The included studies cover the effects on various types of memory encoding for patients either under depression or in remitted depression throughout differing age cohorts.Research methods include testing on source memory, RCFT (Rey-Osterrieth-Complex-Figure-Test), and learning and recall.Overall, depression leads to many negative effects on retention even when a patient is in remission including deficits in contextual cognitive memory, both verbal and non-verbal memory, and working memory.Depression patients have difficulties during the encoding process, which causes impairments of these memories.Giving patients extra cognitive support can help lessen the deficits.However, the problem alters with aging, memory kinds, the number of past depressive episodes, and other control factors.