‘Come on, what are we doing here?’”
The actor and presenter says she used
to be the go-to person for remembering
people’s names at parties, but now
“somebody can be introduced to me and
nanoseconds later their name has gone”.
Karen says her biggest fear isn’t
standing in front of a room of 500
people, but “losing my train of thought
or not being able to recall what it is I’m
trying to say.”
While not all cancer sufferers are
affected by cognitive challenges, those
who are experience it differently. One
lady she spoke to could no longer
reverse her car into the garage, despite
living in the same house with the same
car for 12 years. “She just couldn’t get it
right in her head,” explains Karen.
For most people, the cognitive
impairment is mild, but it nonetheless
interferes with everyday activities like
work and raising a family. For Karen, it
was annoying and frustrating, affecting
“simple things like going to the shop
to get something, and you get there,
and you’ve got no idea what it was”,
she says.
“Sometimes, when I started to talk I
knew exactly what I wanted to say, andI’d get halfway through the sentence
and suddenly it just stops, and I’ve lost
it completely.”
Professor Sanchia Aranda, AM,
notes that many people with cancer
also experience what’s known as
cognitive fatigue. “They feel as if their
brains have not got the same stamina
that they had before,” she explains.
She says that apart from neurotoxicity
(toxic substances affecting the brain),
“it may also be that you’re under stress,
you’ve got a lot more things going on in
your life, you’re more distracted perhaps
from normal cognitive processing.
“Sorting out what all the elements
are that contribute to the phenomenon
will help with the development of
interventions,” she says.
Professor Aranda adds that in some
cases, ongoing cognitive problems can
limit cancer survivors from returning to
their previous roles, so understanding
chemo brain is important for helping
them recover. “People often change
roles and go for things that require less
executive function or go to part-time
work or retire early,” she says.
“Somebody might be able to cope with
chemo brain if it’s short term and endssusceptibility to cognitive impairment
after cancer treatment, including a gene
that is associated with Alzheimer’s
disease and another that influences
how quickly the brain metabolises the
neurotransmitter dopamine.
While these have all looked at what
happens after treatment, Dr Walker’s
research has explored what could be
causing cognitive impairment in breast
cancer patients prior to chemotherapy.
Using animal models, he found that
cognitive problems could develop before
there were any other cancer symptoms.
“It suggests to us that the tumour may
have already hijacked the brain,” he says.
“So we need to re-evaluate what we think
of as chemo brain and maybe call it
‘cancer-associated cognitive impairment’
or ‘cancer brain’, because it’s not just
about the chemo.”
Life with chemo brain
Karen says she didn’t realise that chemo
brain was a thing until she heard other
cancer survivors talking about it. She
likens the experience to a computer
screen freezing up. “It’s really frustrating
because the screen in your head has
frozen but the rest of your body is going