Prospective memory impairment in chemotherapy-exposed early breast cancer survivors: Preliminary evidence from a clinical test

ABSTRACT

We report the results of a secondary analysis of a cross-sectional study (Paquet et al., 2013) to evaluate the cognitive operations involved in prospective memory (PM) deficits exhibited by chemotherapy-exposed breast cancer (BC) survivors. PM was assessed with the memory for intentions screening test administered to 80 patients and 80 healthy controls. Patients performed worse than controls on the PM tasks and had more “omission” errors (indices of the prospective component of the tasks) than the controls. No group differences emerged on a recognition test. Although further studies will be needed to disentangle the multiple cognitive operations involved in PM, these findings are consistent with the notion that self-initiated retrieval processes rather than encoding are implicated in PM impairment among BC survivors.

KEYWORDS:

• cognitive deficits
• chemotherapy
• breast cancer
• prospective memory impairment
• chemobrain

Acknowledgments

Presented in part at the 4th International Conference on Prospective Memory, Naples, May 26–30, 2014. We thank the members of the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre Breast disease site group for their help recruiting patients to participate in the study.

Funding

The study was funded by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation—Ontario Region. Marc Bedard was financially supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.