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Chemotherapy May Affect Memory

Cancer patients treated with standard doses of chemotherapy are twice as likely to develop cognitive impairments as those patients treated only with radiation or surgery. In a study conducted at Dartmouth Medical School, survivors of breast and lymphoma cancers who had undergone chemotherapy an average of 10 years before were given a series of tests to measure intellectual skill and memory capabilities. The results were compared to the test scores of those patients not treated with chemotherapy.

The findings, presented at the American Cancer Society meeting in Tampa last week, showed that chemotherapy may indeed cause long-term deficits in intellectual ability. In four of the nine tests, chemotherapy patients scored near the bottom twice as often as non-chemotherapy survivors. Doctors believe this suggests that aggressive, high-dose chemotherapy should be used with great caution when treating cancer in its early stages, and only when high doses will significantly increase the patient's chance for survival.

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Brain Power, Due to Changes in Pregnancy, May Be Boosted

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Colostrinin Polypeptide in Early Milk Facilitates Learning and Memory in Rats

A complex of polypeptides derived from the colostrum of sheep, called colostrinin, is thought to facilitate spatial and incidental learning in the elderly. In a study reported in Pharmacology Biochemical Behavior 1999 Sep;64(1):183-9 using rats scientists gave groups of old and young animals 4mg doses of colostrinin before putting them through a series of cognitive-functioning tests. The study was conducted at the Institute of Pharmacology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow.

Although the test performance of younger rats appeared unaffected by colostrinin, aged rats showed considerable improvement in both spatial and incidental learning tasks after receiving their dose. Colostrinin may improve cognitive abilities by encouraging the early postnatal development of cerebroneural placticity.