Chemotherapy causes brain shrinkage, study finds: NewsTarget.com

Breast cancer patients who are treated with both surgery and chemotherapy may suffer from brain shrinkage that can affect memory and cognition, according to a new Japanese study appearing in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Cancer.

Women who undergo adjuvant chemotherapy -- chemo used in conjunction with another treatment, usually surgery -- to treat breast cancer often experience a phenomenon called "chemobrain" during treatment. Patients who experience "chemobrain" complain of memory and cognition problems.

A team of researchers examined high-resolution MRI brain scans of breast cancer survivors treated with adjuvant chemotherapy taken one year after the patients' surgery. The researchers compared those scans to brain scans of adjuvant chemo patients taken three years after surgery, and to scans of healthy control patients.

The researchers found that the patients whose scans had been taken a year after surgery had smaller gray and white brain matter in areas of the brain that are involved in cognition and memory compared to the control patients who had never undergone chemotherapy.

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Chemotherapy causes brain shrinkage, study finds

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