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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 The women were between 18 and 55 years of age. None had experienced recurrent breast cancer or had a history of any other type of cancer. As well, none of the patients was still undergoing chemo at the start of the study, and none had a family history of dementia.
Over 100 patients underwent an initial MRI brain scan one year after cancer surgery. About half of this group had also undergone chemotherapy.
According to the researchers, patients who had received chemotherapy had smaller brain volumes in areas that control cognitive function, compared to those who had not been exposed to chemo.
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However, imaging taken at the 3-year mark from 130 patients showed no remaining brain size differences whatsoever.
The authors stressed that cancer, on its own, did not explain the reductions in brain volume. Cancer patients often displayed brain volumes that were similar to healthy controls, they said.
Instead, the observed short-term changes seemed linked to chemo and not to malignant disease, they said.
Inagaki's group cautioned that their finding is just an observed association and does not confirm a cause-and-effect relationship between chemotherapy and brain changes. They called for additional MRI imaging to further investigate the issue.
Dr. Claudine Isaacs, an associate professor of medicine and the director of the Clinical Breast Cancer Program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., described the findings as "encouraging."
"The problem with chemo-brain is that it is often hard to tell what it is related to, because there are so many factors involved -- chemotherapy, the medication that goes with it, the fatigue, and everything else that goes along with a diagnosis of cancer," she noted. "They all play in together."
"So, although this study is relatively quite small, it is a good attempt to look at ways -- with MRI, functional PET scans -- of trying to get a better handle on a real phenomenon in a structural kind of way," Isaacs said.
"But we need to be careful," she cautioned, "because we still don't have the perfect study yet. So we really can't tell patients exactly what the parameters are at this point."
More information
For additional information on chemo-brain, visit the American Cancer Society (www.cancer.org ).
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