Abstract
BackgroundPrevious studies have found abnormal structural and functional brain alterations in breast cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy. However, the network-level brain changes following chemotherapy remain unknown. The purpose of this study was to investigate the dynamic changes of large-scale within- and between-network functional connectivity in chemotherapy-treated breast cancer patients.MethodsSeventeen breast cancer patients were evaluated with resting state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), neuropsychological tests and blood examination before postoperative chemotherapy (t0), one week after completing chemotherapy (t1) and six months after completing chemotherapy (t2). Nineteen age- and education level-matched healthy controls (HC) were also recruited. Independent components analysis (ICA) was performed to assess network component using rs-fMRI data. The functional network changes were then correlated with cognitive assessment scores and blood biochemical indexes.ResultsOne-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed significantly changed within-network functional connectivity in the anterior and posterior default mode network (ADMN and PDMN), left and right frontoparietal network (LFPN and RFPN), visual network and self-referential network. Post-hoc test showed that decreased within-network functional connectivity in ADMN, PDMN, LFPN, RFPN, SRN and central network one week after chemotherapy and increased six months after chemotherapy (all P < 0.05). As for the between-network functional connectivity, the PDMN- sensorimotor network connectivity showed the same tendency. Most of these within- and between-network functional connectivity changes were negatively associated with blood biochemical indexes and cognitive assessment scores (all P < 0.05).ConclusionsThese results indicated that chemotherapy may induce widespread abnormalities in resting state networks, which may serve as a potential biomarker of chemotherapy related cognitive impairment, providing insights for further functional recovery treatment.
Highlights
Previous studies have found abnormal structural and functional brain alterations in breast cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy
Feng et al Cancer Imaging (2020) 20:73 (Continued from previous page). These results indicated that chemotherapy may induce widespread abnormalities in resting state networks, which may serve as a potential biomarker of chemotherapy related cognitive impairment, providing insights for further functional recovery treatment
Demographic and clinical data A total of 17 breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy completed all tests at three time points (t0, t1 and t2)
Summary
Previous studies have found abnormal structural and functional brain alterations in breast cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy. Brain activation and connectivity studies showed that breast cancer survivors had abnormal brain activity and decreased neural network transfer efficiency from large-scale perspectives [10,11,12]. These damaged brain structural and functional areas partially overlapped, mostly located in the frontal and temporal lobes. This indicates that chemotherapy induced common cognitive deficits may be related to the largescale abnormal brain activity/connectivity
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