Chemo Brain

When I read this, I screamed at my computer screen, "hell, I could have told you that!"  But, my story is anecdotal, as are many other women who have been impacted with chemo brain.  It turns out that chemo brain does have a long-term impact on congnitive functions.

Chemotherapy causes changes in the
brain’s metabolism and blood flow that can last as long as 10
years, a discovery that may explain the mental fog and
confusion that affect many cancer survivors, researchers said
on Thursday.

The researchers, from the University of California, Los
Angeles, found that women who had undergone chemotherapy five
to 10 years earlier had lower metabolism in a key region of the
frontal cortex.

Women treated with chemotherapy also showed a spike in
blood flow to the frontal cortex and cerebellum while
performing memory tests, indicating a rapid jump in activity
level, the researchers said in a statement about their study.

"The same area of the frontal lobe that showed lower
resting metabolism displayed a substantial leap in activity
when the patients were performing the memory exercise," said
Daniel Silverman, the UCLA associate professor who led the
study.

"In effect, these women’s brains were working harder than
the control subjects’ to recall the same information," he said
in a statement.

When I first discussed my decressed attention span, decreased ability to focus, decreased ability to understand what I was reading, decreased abilityto find the right word, in short congnitive functions, with my oncologist, the only suggestion he had was to work harder at the areas I felt were/had decreased.  One of the ways Ive combated chemo brain was to start this blog more than two years ago.

But, until now chemo brain was dismissed by many doctors.  Even in the breast cancer patient/survivors bible, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, she says that chemo brain is only just getting studied, seriously.  (3rd edition pg 534)   The first study didn’t have a control group, a study in the Netherlands did have a control group and got similar results to the non-controlled study.  But, in the second study, some of the women complaining of a decrease in cognitive functions didn’t show a decrease in their tests.  Go figure.

What this new study finds is a difinitive reason for the fog that rolls in unannounced and unwanted.  Now, it would be nice to find a way to combat that undesired fog, aka chemo brain, in the next few years.