This is scary as the median age for breast cancer becomes younger and younger.
Primary breast cancer (meaning a breast malignancy that hasn't spread to
other parts of the body) isn't usually thought of as causing
neurological problems. After all, if cancer hasn't spread to the brain,
why would it? Researchers have been forced to wonder about the answer to
that question because a growing body of evidence over the past several
years strongly suggests that women with breast cancer are at increased
risk for not only problems with brain function but with actual
alterations in their brain structure, too.
It turns out, according to a report just published in the November issue of the
Archives of Neurology,
that it's not the cancer but the treatment for breast cancer --
specifically chemotherapy -- that could be causing a significant amount
of the neurological impairment with poor outcomes seen in women with
breast cancer.
Shelli R. Kesler, Ph.D., and colleagues at
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, conducted
an observational study to investigate whether patterns of brain
activation differed between breast cancer survivors who were treated
with chemotherapy and those who didn't have chemo. The research team
also compared the brain activity of these breast cancer survivors to the
brain activity of healthy women who were cancer-free.
In all,
the study involved 25 women with breast cancer who received
chemotherapy, 19 women with breast cancer who did not undergo
chemotherapy, and 18 healthy female controls. All the research subjects
were matched for age and other variables. The women were asked to
perform a variety of tasks while the scientists used functional MRIs to
measure and document activation in several areas of the women's brains.
Imaging tests showed specific areas of brain injury
"Women
with breast cancer demonstrated significantly reduced activation in the
left middle dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and premotor cortex compared
with healthy controls," the authors reported in the paper. "The
chemotherapy group also demonstrated significantly reduced left caudal
lateral prefrontal cortex activation and increased perseverative errors
and reduced processing speed compared with the other two groups."
So
what does this mean in plain English? The researchers concluded that
primary breast cancer may cause measurable brain injury but chemotherapy
clearly showed significant negative effects on brain function. The
damage caused by chemotherapy was more likely to be increased in older
women and those with less education, too.
"Women treated with
chemotherapy may show additional prefrontal deficits and have difficulty
compensating for neurobiological changes such that they also show
impaired executive function," the scientists concluded in their research
paper.
This is very worrisome because executive function is a
critical part of normal brain function. The components of executive
function include working memory and recall (holding facts in your mind
while working on a problem and accessing facts stored in long-term
memory); paying attention and completing tasks; emotional control, such
as thinking before acting and speaking; using self-talk to control
behavior; and complex problem solving including analyzing issues and
coming up with new ideas.
Sources for this article include:
http://archneur.ama-assn.org/http://pubs.ama-assn.org/http://www.naturalnews.com/chemothe...
S.L. Baker - Natural News
