Chemotherapy can impair cognition more than two decades later
More than 20 years after treatment, breast cancer patients who received adjuvant chemotherapy exhibited cognitive deficits compared with women who were never diagnosed with cancer. The results, which appeared online February 27 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest that the phenomenon known as chemobrain can persist for decades after cancer treatment ends and may become more common as the number of cancer survivors grows.
To investigate chemotherapy’s long-term effects on cognition, Dr. Vincent Koppelmans of Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and his colleagues identified 196 eligible breast cancer patients from two Dutch hospital registries and invited them to participate in tests that measured learning, memory, information processing, and psychomotor abilities.
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