Chemobrain Is Real but May Need New Name

Cancer patients know that chemobrain is real. The nearly ubiquitous experience of foggy thinking immediately after chemotherapy treatment has even inspired T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with “My Name is Chemo Brain.” For some cancer survivors, the cognitive effects of chemotherapy such as lack of concentration and short-term memory loss linger for years after treatment, but little is known about who is most likely to suffer a long-term deficit or how to guard against it. Confounding factors such as fatigue and depression—as well as widely divergent patient experiences—have made studying the cognitive consequences of chemotherapy problematic. That obstacle has led to a disconnect between patient experiences and physician attention to the issue. “I think it's probably true that there's still a fair amount of skepticism amongst some people about how real of a phenomenon this is,” says Tim Ahles, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “Even though patients have been talking about this for years, really since the 1970s, it's only the last 10 years that anyone has been doing systematic research.”