• Cancer · Jan 2016

    Comparative Study

    Reduced prefrontal activation during working and long-term memory tasks and impaired patient-reported cognition among cancer survivors postchemotherapy compared with healthy controls.

    • Lei Wang, Alexandra C Apple, Matthew P Schroeder, Anthony J Ryals, Joel L Voss, Darren Gitelman, Jerry J Sweet, Zeeshan A Butt, David Cella, and Lynne I Wagner.
    • Division of Clinical Psychology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois.
    • Cancer. 2016 Jan 15; 122 (2): 258-68.

    BackgroundPatients who receive adjuvant chemotherapy have reported cognitive impairments that may last for years after the completion of treatment. Working memory-related and long-term memory-related changes in this population are not well understood. The objective of this study was to demonstrate that cancer-related cognitive impairments are associated with the under recruitment of brain regions involved in working and recognition memory compared with controls.MethodsOncology patients (n = 15) who were receiving adjuvant chemotherapy and had evidence of cognitive impairment according to neuropsychological testing and self-report and a group of age-matched, education group-matched, cognitively normal control participants (n = 14) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants performed a nonverbal n-back working memory task and a visual recognition task.ResultsOn the working memory task, when 1-back and 2-back data were averaged and contrasted with 0-back data, significantly reduced activation was observed in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for oncology patients versus controls. On the recognition task, oncology patients displayed decreased activity of the left-middle hippocampus compared with controls. Neuroimaging results were not associated with patient-reported cognition.ConclusionsDecreased recruitment of brain regions associated with the encoding of working memory and recognition memory was observed in the oncology patients compared with the control group. These results suggest that there is a reduction in neural functioning postchemotherapy and corroborate patient-reported cognitive difficulties after cancer treatment, although a direct association was not observed. Cancer 2016;122:258-268. © 2015 American Cancer Society.© 2015 American Cancer Society.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…