Chemobrain
Reported December 20, 2004
HOUSTON (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) — Chemotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment. But with the therapy comes an often overlooked side effect that researchers have dubbed “chemobrain.” Here’s what is and what doctors are doing to stop it.
Janis Shea works hard to stay focused. “I’m lost,” she says. “I can’t say what I want to say right now. My thoughts have just left me.”
Chemotherapy helped Janis beat breast cancer, but those treatments left her with memory loss and attention problems. It’s a phenomenon doctors call chemobrain.
“Their memory retrieval’s very unreliable, so they’ll block on words in conversation or forget people’s names. It’s very aggravating,” says Christina Meyers, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Janis’s husband, an oncologist named Renato Lenzi, M.D., says her behavior was unusual. “She started saying things that were really out of character.”
Ten years after her treatments, Janis still has trouble paying attention.
Dr. Meyers says, “I think a lot of people have that expectation that when treatment ends, the chemotherapy gets out of their body, and they should pop back to normal, and that is not the case at all.”
It’s not clear exactly how chemo affects the brain, but Dr. Meyers says relaxation exercises can ease symptoms. Medications like Procrit and Ritalin are also used to help patients. “It helps people focus and concentrate, and most of these patients also experience a lot of fatigue, and it helps with their stamina and fatigue as well,” she says.
Janis has her own remedies. “I did a lot of journaling — an enormous amount of reading,” she says. “I read all the time. I think that I’m much, much better. However, back to normal? I don’t know. I don’t know what this is anymore.”
But she says she’s still trying to get there.
Dr. Meyers says memory and concentration problems can occur more than a year after stopping chemo treatment. However, she says not all patients on chemotherapy will experience these types of problems. More than half of people on chemotherapy develop significant chemobrain symptoms.
If you would like more information, please contact:
M.D. Anderson Information Line
(800) 392-1611