Chen Xingui, Li Jingjing, Ren Jing, Hu Xinglong, Zhu Chunyan, Tian Yanghua, Hu Panpan, Ma Huijuan, Yu Fengqiong, Wang Kai
Laboratory of Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China.
Psychooncology. 2014 Oct;23(10):1165-71. doi: 10.1002/pon.3539. Epub 2014 Apr 15.
Complaints about attention disorders are common among breast cancer survivors who have undergone chemotherapy treatment. However, it is not known whether these complaints indicate a global attention deficit or the selective impairment of attention networks.
This study sought to investigate the attentional abilities of breast cancer patients after chemotherapy treatment using the attention network test (ANT).
The participants included breast cancer patients who had undergone chemotherapy (CT, N = 58), patients who had not undergone chemotherapy (non-CT, N = 53), and matched healthy controls (HC, N = 55). All participants completed the ANT, which provides measures of three independent attention networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) and neuropsychological background tests.
Our results indicated that the chemotherapy-treated breast cancer patients had significant deficits in the alerting and executive control networks but not in the orienting network. The CT group scored significantly lower in several cognitive tasks, including attention, memory, and information processing tasks, relative to the other two groups. Additionally, significant correlations were found between information processing and the efficiency of the executive control network within the CT group.
These results suggest that the three attention networks were selectively impaired following chemotherapy treatment, which affected different brain areas in the breast cancer survivors.
在接受过化疗的乳腺癌幸存者中，关于注意力障碍的抱怨很常见。然而，尚不清楚这些抱怨是表明存在整体注意力缺陷还是注意力网络的选择性受损。
本研究旨在使用注意力网络测试（ANT）调查化疗后乳腺癌患者的注意力能力。
参与者包括接受过化疗的乳腺癌患者（CT组，N = 58）、未接受过化疗的患者（非CT组，N = 53）以及匹配的健康对照者（HC组，N = 55）。所有参与者均完成了ANT，该测试提供了三个独立注意力网络（警觉、定向和执行控制）的测量指标以及神经心理学背景测试。
我们的结果表明，接受化疗的乳腺癌患者在警觉和执行控制网络方面存在显著缺陷，但在定向网络方面没有。与其他两组相比，CT组在包括注意力、记忆和信息处理任务在内的多项认知任务中的得分显著更低。此外，在CT组中，信息处理与执行控制网络的效率之间存在显著相关性。
这些结果表明，化疗后三个注意力网络存在选择性受损，这影响了乳腺癌幸存者的不同脑区。
