Which Chemotherapy Drug Causes The Worst 'Chemobrain'?
What is chemobrain?
Neuroimaging seems to infer that chemotherapy causes a diffuse, widespread injury to the brain and possibly increases sensitivity to future neurodegeneration.
Reported symptoms of chemobrain can include:
- Forgetting things that would normally come to mind with ease
- Loss of focus and decline in attention span
- Difficulty in multitasking
- Forgetting common words, dates and events
- Taking longer to complete tasks, easily distracted.
The default mode network includes the precuneus, cingulate, medial frontal, middle temporal and lateral parietal regions of the brain, plus the hippocampus. This network is believed to be involved in implicit learning, monitoring and the allocation of neural resources to various cognitive processes.
Anthracycline-based group performed worse on verbal memory tasks
The current study was headed up by Shelli R. Kesler, PhD, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Dr. Douglas W. Blayney, of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
The research utilized retrospective data from 62 breast cancer survivors who finished treatment at least 2 years earlier. Of this group, 20 had been treated with anthracycline-based chemotherapy, 19 had been given nonanthracycline-based drugs and the remaining 23 had not received any chemotherapy.
The authors recognize that the sample group is small, but results gleaned from this study can be used as the impetus to conduct more research.
Neuropsychological tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were utilized to assess the women's cognitive status and brain connectivity.
The team found that the women in the anthracycline-based group performed significantly worse on verbal memory tasks and showed less lower left precuneus connectivity.
Learn more and read the entire original article in Medical News Today here.