Belgian researchers used functional brain
imaging to measure activity during multitasking before and after chemotherapy,
finding decreased brain activity when compared to pre-chemotherapy baseline and
to individuals who did not receive chemotherapy.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Researchers
at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
in Belgium published a new report this
week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that describes what
they found when they examined whether cognitive complaints after breast cancer
treatment involving chemotherapy are associated with observable brain activity
changes. The complaints are well-documented and collectively referred to as
“chemo brain,” a perception of greater effort needed to complete cognitive
tasks after treatment of cancer with chemotherapy.
“Cognitive
complaints of people increase with chemotherapy and we are trying to find out
why,” said Sabine Deprez, lead author on the paper. “Difficulty multitasking is
one of the biggest complaints.”
Cognitive
performance decreases have been reported in cancer patients following
chemotherapy and also after no chemotherapy. The distinction between mental
performance decreases related to chemotherapy and those possibly caused by the
advance of the disease itself has been difficult to make. To date, brain
imaging studies focused on comparing cancer patients treated with chemotherapy
and healthy individuals. Deprez and colleagues compared mental function before
and several months after chemotherapy in the same 18 women treated with
chemotherapy for breast cancer. These women were also compared to other women
with breast cancer but not receiving chemotherapy as well as with women with no
cancer or treatment.
“The special
thing about how we did the design was that before we did it we adjusted the
difficulty for each patient, and the performance of everyone was between 70 and
80 percent,” Deprez said.
The
measurements of the study were made by imaging the brains of the women with
functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, while they were in the fMRI
machine and engaging in multitasking behavior routines. The routines involved
indicating whether two sounds were of the same frequency and if two moving
objects were oriented in the same way, both while remembering two symbols
presented earlier.
The
researchers found that while the healthy and cancer with no chemotherapy groups
exhibited no change in brain activation magnitude and location, the cancer with
chemotherapy group experienced significantly decreased brain activity in
regions that were more active at the beginning of the study, before
chemotherapy was administered. This group complained of “foggy thinking” after
their chemotherapy regimens.
“The
important thing that we found was a relation with subjective cognitive
complaint,” Deprez said in an interview. “It feels like they have to do more
effort to get the same result after chemo.”
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