Patients with breast cancer who are treated with surgery and chemotherapy may suffer brain shrinkage that can affect memory and cognition, according to a new Japanese study appearing in the January 1 issue of Cancer.
Women who undergo adjuvant chemotherapy ' chemotherapy used in combination with another treatment, usually surgery ' to treat breast cancer often experience a phenomenon called 'chemobrain' during treatment. Chemobrain Patients experience '' complain of impaired memory and cognition.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Masatoshi Inagaki of the National Cancer Center Hospital East examined high-resolution MRI brain scans of survivors of breast cancer treated with adjuvant chemotherapy taken one year after surgery patients . The researchers compared the brain scans scans of patients with adjuvant chemotherapy, three years after surgery, and scans of healthy control patients.
The researchers found that patients whose scans had taken a year on the brain after surgery had less gray and white in the brain areas involved in cognition and memory ' the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus and regions precuneus ' compared with control patients who had never undergone chemotherapy.
However, Inagaki found that brain shrinkage appears to be reversible, since there was no difference in brain size between patients on scans taken three years after the surgery and control patients.
'The results lead to the idea that chemotherapy could have a temporary effect on brain structure,' the researchers wrote. 'These findings may provide new insights for future research to improve the quality of life of cancer patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy.'
The researchers studied the effects of different chemotherapy agents in the brain due to interactions between chemotherapy drugs that have made it difficult to draw definitive conclusions. However, Inagaki and his colleagues that 'these results suggest a potential effect of adjuvant chemotherapy in brain structure, and changes in brain structure may be associated with memory function.
