Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Neurobiol Dis. 2012 Dec;48(3):329-38. doi: 10.1016/j.nbd.2012.07.009. Epub 2012 Jul 20.
Many women with breast cancer, especially those treated with chemotherapy, experience cognitive decline due in part to neurotoxic brain injury. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest widespread brain structural abnormalities pointing to disruption of large-scale brain networks. We applied resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging and graph theoretical analysis to examine the connectome in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy relative to healthy comparison women. Compared to healthy females, the breast cancer group displayed altered global brain network organization characterized by significantly decreased global clustering as well as disrupted regional network characteristics in frontal, striatal and temporal areas. Breast cancer survivors also showed significantly increased self-report of executive function and memory difficulties compared to healthy females. These results suggest that topological organization of both global and regional brain network properties may be disrupted following breast cancer and chemotherapy. This pattern of altered network organization is believed to result in reduced efficiency of parallel information transfer. This is the first report of alterations in large-scale functional brain networks in this population and contributes novel information regarding the neurobiologic mechanisms underlying breast cancer-related cognitive impairment.
许多患有乳腺癌的女性，尤其是接受化疗的女性，会出现认知能力下降的情况，部分原因是由于神经毒性脑损伤。最近的神经影像学研究表明，广泛的大脑结构异常表明大尺度脑网络受到破坏。我们应用静息态功能磁共振成像和图论分析方法，研究了接受化疗的乳腺癌幸存者与健康对照组女性的连接组。与健康女性相比，乳腺癌组的大脑整体网络组织发生了改变，表现为全局聚类明显降低，额叶、纹状体和颞叶等区域的网络特征也受到破坏。乳腺癌幸存者与健康女性相比，执行功能和记忆困难的自我报告也明显增加。这些结果表明，乳腺癌和化疗后，大脑整体和局部网络特性的拓扑组织可能会被打乱。这种网络组织改变的模式被认为会导致平行信息传递效率降低。这是该人群中大规模功能大脑网络改变的首次报道，为乳腺癌相关认知障碍的神经生物学机制提供了新的信息。
