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Oct. 5, 2006 -- Years after chemotherapy, some breast cancer patients have subtle memory and concentration problems often dubbed "chemo brain," a new study shows.
The study, published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, comes from researchers including Daniel H. Silverman, MD, PhD.
Silverman is the head of neuronuclear imaging and is an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"Over the last half-dozen years or so, there has been this increasingly recognized phenomenon of what is often termed ?chemo brain,'" Silverman tells WebMD.
He says patients describe chemo brain as "an impairment in their cognitive abilities -- to attend to things, and to concentrate, and to multitask."
"What's been missing from this, though ? is looking directly at the brain -- what's going on inside to account for that," Silverman says.
The new study "represents the first direct look at brain metabolism associated with these chemo brain problems," Silverman says.
About the Study
Silverman's team studied 24 women, including 21 breast cancer survivors.
The women were about 47-58 years old, on average. The breast cancer survivors had been diagnosed with breast cancer an average of seven years earlier.
All of the breast cancer survivors had gotten surgery to remove their tumors.
Eleven survivors had also gotten chemotherapy and taken the drug tamoxifen. Five others had received chemotherapy but hadn't taken tamoxifen. Five more breast cancer survivors hadn't received chemotherapy or tamoxifen.
The study took place five to 10 years after the women's last chemotherapy dose.
The women got positron emission tomography (PET) scans of their brains while taking two memory tests.
In one test, each woman looked at a complex drawing and tried to copy it with pen and paper, first while looking at the drawing and then from memory.
In the other test, each woman was shown pairs of words that they had to recall when the pairs were jumbled on a computer screen 10 minutes or one day later.
"They're hard tests," Silverman says. "It takes that kind of difficult challenge to be able to bring out these subtle deficits."