"Chemo Brain is real" say Researchers

[Insomniac]

This news item says that some researchers found that chemo brain is real (was it unrecognised before?)
and they did a few cognitive tests to prove it.

What got me was that the lead researcher in the article is now trying to find out if exercise, of all things would treat it.
I wonder if chemo brain is similar to brain fog in ME.

http://news.ubc.ca/2015/04/27/chemo-brain-is-real-say-ubc-researchers/

 

[GhostGum]

The descriptions sounds a lot like an ME brain to me, 'wandering off' after very short attempts at focusing, when asked to relax the brain continued to be more active than normal. Makes me think if the brain 'wandering off' is simply like a defensive mechanism, it is failing to maintain the capacity to focus on a task for a reasonable, or even minor amount of time and is simply desperate to rest and try to repair or regulate itself properly. And yeah, throw a cocktail of nasty chemicals into the body and it is a surprise it causes cognitive issues?

Exercise might help people getting treated for chemo, assuming it does not add more pressure on their already struggling immune system. Do we even know if cancer patients can have issues with exertion due to the strain they are already under?

 

[sarah darwins]

It may be that no one had got around to testing for it before, or had the will to, but I don't think anyone doubted that it existed. When my partner had chemo the nurses in the unit, who were much more aware of the unwanted effects of the drugs than the consultants were, talked about it as something entirely routine. They observed it all the time when talking to longer-term chemo patients whom they got to know very well over the course of a treatment series.

The similarity of chemo brain to ME cognitive issues does seem like further support for the idea of toxins playing a role in ME.

 

[chipmunk1]

And how do we treat chemo brain?

As always with CBT and it is of course effective!! Works for everything under the sun.

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/10/27/jnci.djs477.full.pdf html

They are even considering computerized CBT for chemo brain. They have completely lost their mind and not even CBT could fix that.

As the number of cognitive behavioral interventions expands, researchers hope to learn more about what models and components are most effective. “There are so many questions out there,” said Cherrier. “There’s the optimal duration and frequency of the intervention, [and] the method—should it be individual- or groupbased, computerized or in-person?”

Cognition Many chemobrain studies have found no association between patient reports of cognitive problems—“subjective cognition” in psychologists’ terms—and the findings of test results, or “objective cognition.” But Deprez’s study found that structural changes in the brain associated with both subjective and objective cognition. This was “one of the first studies to show that what patients are saying is backed up by test abnormalities,” Ganz said. “It shows we have to believe the patient.” Heather Green, Ph.D., an Australian investigator, agrees: “The so-called objective tests have their limitations,” she wrote in an e-mail from Griffith University in Southeast Queensland. “In a number of circumstances, patients’ self-reports of their everyday experiences may be more accurate and more sensitive than what can be detected by our current objective assessment methods.”

 

[sarah darwins]

And yeah, throw a cocktail of nasty chemicals into the body and it is a surprise it causes cognitive issues?

And I guess that's another argument against testing new meds on mice etc. That the mouse can still find the cheese at the end of the maze after exposure to a drug doesn't mean a person will be able to string a sentence together coherently or recall and reorganise disparate data into novel patterns as required after exposure to the same drug.

 

[Dreambirdie]

What brilliant geniuses these researchers are... to figure out that injecting people with drugs that are in the same category as chemical fumigants will affect their cognitive functioning. And it only took them *how long* to figure this out...?

And surprise, the earth is not flat after all.

 

[chipmunk1]

What brilliant geniuses these researchers are... to figure out that injecting people with drugs that are in the same category as chemical fumigants will affect their cognitive functioning. And it only took them *how long* to figure this out...?

Decades. and it will take them another few decades to find out that CBT is not a real therapy.