Short-term monitoring of cognitive functions before and during the first course of treatment

Abstract

The results suggest that chemotherapy has negative short-term effects on some cognitive functions. But age-dependent effects were only found for memory.

The cognitive effects of chemotherapy in post-menopausal breast cancer patients: a controlled longitudinal study

“…Anecdotal concerns tend to focus on memory and attention problems. The most common areas of cognitive difficulties seen in the BC literature are: working memory, visual memory, verbal memory, executive functioning, information processing speed, attention, learning, and visuospatial functioning [11,27,[30][31][32][33].…”

Cognitive function after chemotherapy in adults with solid tumours

“…All the other cognitive studies which have measured psychological distress have found no correlation between objective cognitive performance and depression, anxiety and/or mood [11,[13][14][15][16][17]76,78,79,84,85,87,91,119,147]. However, as discussed in Section 6, many studies have found a strong association between perceived cognitive impairment and anxiety and/or depression [11,17,78,87,91,101].…”

“…The use of a disease specific control group enabled the authors to account for non-chemotherapy disease and host-related factors that might have contributed to cognitive impairment. Also, a study comparing patients tested pre-chemotherapy to a different group tested after their first cycle of chemotherapy showed greater impairment on word generation, memory and verbal learning in the post chemotherapy group, although this finding could be confounded by acute symptoms secondary to the chemotherapy [119].…”

Memory and Cancer: A Review of the Literature

“…Further, the co-morbidities of cancer may include cognitive impairment. Older patients with hematological disease or cancer of the intestinal tract have experienced negative outcomes (Eberhardt Dilger Musial, Wedding, Weiss, & Miltner, 2006). …”