Animal Preclinical Models Show Evidence behind "Chemo-Brain"

    Chemo-Brain is the colloquial term for a side effect of chemotherapy treatment that is only commonly talked about amongst cancer survivors. It is the impairment of memory, attention, and cognitive processing that occurs once someone has been exposed to a chemotherapeutic agent. Chemo-Brain is a condition that can be related to by most all cancer survivors yet there is not much research that has been conducted on it. Many survivors have been told that they are not actually experiencing it while others have had to quit jobs or change lifestyles in order to accommodate for it. Any ongoing and recent research about Chemo-Brain needs to be given attention so that cancer survivors and chemotherapy patients with these symptoms can feel validated. One of the strongest pieces of evidence behind Chemo-Brain is a research article published in 2021 called "Animal models of chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline in preclinical drug development". Researchers John et al were able to find evidence in animal models regarding a correlation between chemotherapy exposure and cognitive decline. They found that there were altered neurotransmitter levels, microtubule disintegration, neuroinflammation, reduced neurogenesis, and mitochondrial dysfunction that were found in each of the animals that were exposed to chemotherapeutic agents regardless of which agent was used. This is all to say that the brains of the animals became inflamed, were not able to form new connections between neurons as efficiently and were overall reduced the function of the brain. This all occurred because the chemotherapeutic drugs used caused higher amounts of cytokines in the brain. These cytokines can cause inflammation, so the brain cells became too compacted together and were therefore not able to function at full capacity (John et al., 2021). This research must be brought into human trials to see if this occurs in human patients undergoing chemotherapy.

References

John, J., Kinra, M., Mudgal, J., Viswanatha, G. L., & Nandakumar, K. (2021). Animal models of chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline in preclinical drug development. Psychopharmacology, 238(11), 3025–3053.