Next: Tools to detect and treat “chemo brain” symptoms common in around 35% of breast cancer survivors

UCLA study reveals treat­ment for women with breast can­cer suf­fer­ing cog­ni­tive dif­fi­cul­ties (Health­Canal):

“UCLA researchers have devel­oped a pro­gram that could improve the day-to-day lives of women with breast can­cer by address­ing post-treat­ment cog­ni­tive dif­fi­cul­ties, some­times known as “chemo brain,” which can affect up to 35 per­cent of women after their treat­ments…

“We gave women exer­cis­es on, for exam­ple, how to remem­ber a ‘to-do’ list, remem­ber­ing to buy items at the store, or plan­ning a par­ty and decid­ing what type of food should be served to guests,” said Ercoli, a co-author of the study. “Par­tic­i­pants were giv­en real-life tasks to com­plete that would use these types of strate­gies to improve cog­ni­tive function.”

“The brain wave pat­tern in the inter­ven­tion group actu­al­ly nor­mal­ized,” Ganz said. “We hope that this might be an effec­tive bio­log­ic way to assess the cog­ni­tive effects of can­cer treat­ment in the future.”

Study: Cog­ni­tive reha­bil­i­ta­tion group inter­ven­tion for breast can­cer sur­vivors: results of a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­al (Psy­cho-Oncol­o­gy). From the abstract:

• Pur­pose: We con­duct­ed a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­al eval­u­at­ing the effi­ca­cy of a cog­ni­tive reha­bil­i­ta­tion (CR) inter­ven­tion com­pared with a wait list (WL) con­trol con­di­tion on cog­ni­tive com­plaints, neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal and brain func­tion­ing in breast can­cer sur­vivors (BCS).
• Con­clu­sions: BCS in the CR group showed imme­di­ate and sus­tained improve­ments in self-report­ed cog­ni­tive com­plaints and mem­o­ry func­tion­ing on neu­rocog­ni­tive test­ing. Results of the qEEG sub­study pro­vide some sup­port for neu­ro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes under­ly­ing the intervention.

Learn more:

• Final­ly, grow­ing aware­ness of chemother­a­py-induced cog­ni­tive deficits