Longitudinal assessment of chemotherapy-induced changes in brain and cognitive functioning: A systematic review

Publication date: Available online 20 May 2018 Source:Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews Author(s): Mingmei Li, Karen Caeyenberghs In addition to the burden of a life-threatening diagnosis, cancer patients are struggling with adverse side-effects from cancer treatment. Chemotherapy has been linked to an array of cognitive impairments and alterations in brain structure and function (“chemobrain”). In this review, we summarized the existing evidence that evaluate the changes in cognitive functioning and brain with chemotherapy, as assessed using structural and functional MRI-based techniques in a longitudinal design. This review followed the latest PRISMA guidelines using Embase, Medline, PsychINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science databases with date restrictions from 2012-2017. Fourteen research articles met the key inclusion criteria: (i) the studies involved adult cancer patients (mean age≥18); (ii) the use of chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer; (iii) pre-post assessment of behavioral and brain-based outcomes; and (iv) abstracts written in English. Effect sizes of subjective and objective cognitive impairments from the reviewed studies were estimated using Cohen’s d or z-scores. We calculated percentage of mean change or effect sizes for main neuroimaging findings when data were available. Strength of the correlations between brain alterations and cognitive changes was obtained using squared correlation coefficients. We showed small to medium effect siz...
Source: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research