Mother aged 32 woke up thinking she was 15

A mother who one day woke up believing she was a teenager after losing 17 years of memory overnight is set to detail her remarkable experience in a new book.

In 2008, Naomi Jacobs - then aged - woke up terrified of her son, in totally unrecognisable surroundings and thought she was 15 years old. Overnight, she had been struck with Transient Global Amnesia, a form of memory loss brought on by stress that had wiped the 'episodic' part of her memory.

The last thing she could remember was falling asleep in her bunk bed as a schoolgirl, dreaming about a boy she had a crush on. She thought it was 1992, John Major was prime minister and she was about to sit her GCSEs. Mobile phones were still the size of a house brick, the internet a mystery - and her 10-year-old son was a stranger.

But Miss Jacobs told the BBC it was when her son bounded up to her yelling 'mum' that she succumbed to 'total shock'. Miss Jacobs had Transient Global Amnesia, a form of memory loss brought on by stress. It affects five in 100,000 people in Britain, rising to 23 in 100,000 in the over 50s.

The condition caused the 'episodic' part of her memory to shut down, meaning she had lost all her emotional memories. But her semantic memory was still intact, meaning she could remember things she had repeated over time such as how to drive and phone numbers she had regularly dialled.

Miss Jacobs has previously described lying awake at night and crying as she desperately tried to make sense of her life and longed to be back at school. She is now set to detail how she began to understand who she was in a new book, titled Forgotten Girl.

The book reveals how she went about piecing her life back together using her personal diaries and those close to her.

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