In recent studies, chemotherapy has been observed to have detrimental effect on brain functions, such as memory and cognitive skills. Although there are many chemotherapy agents to consider, this comprise future researches to study the comparison between chemotherapy agents that can be more harmful than others.
Shelli Kesler, an associate professor of neuro-oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and her colleagues did a study comparing the most commonly used chemotherapy agent: anthracycline to non-anthracycline agents. All the of the 62 participants were female. In the study, the individuals were breast cancer patients, and the control group were women who had early-stage breast cancer patients but didn't receive chemotherapy treatment. The participants engaged in a cognitive testing and had their cerebrum imaged using an fMRI while performing particular tasks.
As of result, the tested subject that had received anthracycline presented a lower verbal memory and recall score than the control group. From this result, Kesler presses concern on the harmful effect that anti-cancer drug can have on the brain. Neuroscientific findings on chemotherapy related to neuro-toxicity have created a closer understanding of neural cognitive behavior and anti-cancer agents. Although, the results enables further studies on whether women with advanced cancer had already harness the damage to the neural network and affecting the individual's cognitive behavior. This would need more detailed studies to help confirm the correlation between anticancer drugs and cognitive behaviors.
Reference:
http://time.com/4132073/chemobrain-breast-cancer/
No comments:
Post a Comment