Chemotherapy‐induced prospective memory impairment in patients with breast cancer

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the event-based prospective memory (EBPM) and time-based prospective memory (TBPM) in chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment in patients with breast cancer. Forty patients with breast cancer who underwent adjuvant chemotherapy and 40 age-matched and education-matched healthy women were administered with a battery of neuropsychological tests including EBPM and TBPM tasks. A significant difference between breast cancer patients and controls was found in the scores on the mini-mental state examination (t = -11.684, p < 0.01), verbal fluency test (t = -7.939, p < 0.01), and digit span (t = -2.538, p < 0.05). Compared with healthy controls, breast cancer patients exhibited a poorer performance on EBPM (t = -7.096, p < 0.01) but not on TBPM (t = -1.921, p > 0.05). Our results suggest that breast cancer patients who had undergone adjuvant chemotherapy show deficits in EBPM but not in TBPM.