Brain Training Helps Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy

The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers.

Brain calisthenics: A Lumosity user plays an online game.

Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as chemo foga cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.

Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.

In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train.

Patients treated with chemotherapy show changes in brain structure and function in line with diffuse brain injury, and they often report long-term cognitive effects, says Shelli Kesler, a Stanford University clinical neuropsychologist who led the research. The new study suggests that cognitive training could be one possible avenue for helping to improve cognitive function in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy, she says.

The results may not convince everyone. One of the biggest challenges in the cognitive training world is to show an effect that generalizes to real-world functioning, says Susan Landau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Several companies offer commercial cognitive training programs that promise improvements in memory, attention, mental agility, and problem-solving skills. The appeal is clear, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but whether they have lasting general effects is not.

The fact that companies are marketing these training programs to customers before their value has been rigorously proved has caused some skepticism in the field, say experts. The field is still growing, says Suzanne Jaeggi, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland. While studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to the training, its very hard to detect an impact on daily life, she says. However, some work, including research by her own group, has shown that working memory exercises can improve reading abilities in schoolchildren.

In the study conducted by Kesler and colleagues, the participants trained at home on Lumosity, a collection of gamelike cognitive exercises developed by Lumos Labs in San Francisco. (Lumos Labs did not fund the study.)

Keslers project is one of around two dozen efforts using Lumosity software to study human cognition. With 35 million customers worldwide, Lumosity is collecting what it says is the worlds largest database of human cognition, which could be queried for connections between lifestyle and cognitive ability. Our technology collects a lot of data and makes it easy to run experiments to learn more generally about human cognitive performance, says Mike Scanlon, cofounder of Lumos Labs. We track all of the results from the cognitive testing and training, and we can combine that with demographic information to learn about how peoples cognitive performance changes and develops over the years.

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Brain Training Helps Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy