Chemotherapy could cause brain damage in some breast cancer patients, affecting the part of the brain responsible for planning, attention and memory, according to a new study published in the Archives of Neurology.
Researchers at Stanford University looked at 25 breast cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy, 19 women with breast cancer who had received surgery instead, and 18 females who had not been diagnosed with breast cancer.
When asked to complete a series of sorting, problem-solving and memory tasks, the 25 women who had received chemotherapy made more errors and also showed significantly less brain activity in the areas responsible for working memory, cognitive control, and planning during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
"This shows that when a patient reports she’s struggling with these types of problems, there’s a good chance there has been a brain change," said lead author Shelli Kesler. "Yet these women are often dismissed as imagining or exaggerating the problems."
The researchers plan to follow up with a long-term study that would compare brain scans of cancer patients before and after treatments in an attempt to identify which women might be most vulnerable to this impairment.