I think you would be wise to see a doctor about this. Loss of memory can happen at any age, even though it tends to be wrongly thought of as something only happening to older people as part of their ageing process. It can be caused by a physical factor causing damage or disease in somebody's brain region but it is virtually impossible to medically diagnose what you report without a thorough assessment and examination of your brain and your lifestyle.

Possible causes of memory loss can be head injury, (which you say might have happened to you when young), degenerative disorder such as Alzheimers or other kinds of dementia, infections such as encepha;litis, thiamine deficiency in alcoholics which can lead to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome as well as brain tumours, strokes and subarachnoid haemorrhage. But amnesia can also occur in some kinds of psychiatric illness in which there is no apparent physical damage to the individual's brain.

But there are steps that everybody should take throughout their life to try to keep their memory functioning properly. Firstly regular physical exercise helps promote optimum brain health by improving blood and oxygen circulation to your brain, and it also combats against conditions that can lead to memory loss like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. So if you do not take much exercise may be that mistake needs to be rectified?

Healthy diet is also important . eat plenty of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains containing high levels of antioxidants, vitamin B and omega fatty acids to help promote your brain health.

Also apart from physical exercise like aerobics, your brain needs to be exercised too to keep it sharp and healthy. When relaxing doing things like memorising such as in freemasonry or crosswords, or Sudoku, word games, or playing chess or other mentally stimulating games can do much to keep your brain working efficiently throughout your ;life well into old age.

If you have a lot of stress in your work or family life you need to learn to cope with it. Because the stress hormone known as cortisol has been found to cause damage to the hippocampus, that is the part of your brain the processes memory, over long periods of time.

Getting adequate sleep is also relevant to memory functioning and everybody is different as to how much they as an individual really need. But sleep deprivation or sleep problems like insomnia or sleep apnea could be a cause memory loss due to lack of restorative sleep.

Also, like with so many other health problems try to avoid smoking, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol or recreational drugs like cannabis. Any of them could cause damage to brain cells and difficulties in retaining and retrieving memories as well as the other negative health conditions we all know they can also cause?