Chemo 'affects brain structure'
Brains of women receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer are altered structurally, study finds
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Monday, 27, Nov 2006 03:25
Short-term structural changes occur in the brain following chemotherapy, a new study has shown.
In the past patients have complained of problems with memory, problem-solving and other cognitive abilities following chemotherapy, but there has been little data available on physical changes in humans' brains.
A lack of controls in studies has also made it difficult to discern which effects are due to cancer and which are due to drugs.
In the latest study, researchers from the Breast Cancer Survivors' Brain MRI Database Group in Japan used MRI scans to take high-resolution images and measure volumes in specific areas of the brain of breast cancer patients who received chemotherapy and those who did not one-year after surgery and three-years after surgery.
They discovered that within 12 months after receiving chemotherapy patients had significantly smaller regions of the brain associated with memory, analysis and other cognitive functions than patients who had not received it.
But this difference was found to have rectified itself within four years after treatment.
Writing in the journal Cancer, the researchers argue that "these results lead to the idea that adjuvant chemotherapy could have a temporary effect on brain structure" and that structural brain changes are due to the chemotherapy rather than a secondary effect of the cancer.