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For cancer survivors who have undergone the struggle of chemotherapy, the road to complete recovery may be a bit longer than expected.

A recent imaging study at UCLA showed a relationship between chemotherapy treatment and changes in brain metabolism in breast cancer patients. At least 25 percent of the patients in the study experienced mental fogginess lasting up to 10 years after chemotherapy treatment, said Daniel Silverman, the study’s lead researcher.

“What is most common for chemo brain patients are inabilities to concentrate, multitask and remember things the way they used to be able to,” he said.

Though the study of “chemo brain” was not considered important a decade ago, it has come into the spotlight recently because cancer patients are now being treated with chemotherapy earlier on. Though the earlier use of chemotherapy serves to prevent the spread of cancer to other parts of the body, it also results in greater occurrences of side effects, Silverman said.

“The single biggest impediment to the quality of life of these women is cognitive dysfunction,” Silverman said.

Renae Taylor, a 46-year-old breast cancer survivor, said she experienced fogginess and fatigue after chemotherapy.

“At one point, I had to take six months off from work because my job demands high attention to detail and I felt like I couldn’t focus,” Taylor said.

Though the effects of chemotherapy have been examined extensively, this study is the first to look at brain metabolism in greater depth.

The study consisted of 34 women, 13 of whom were controls who did not have cancer and had not undergone chemotherapy. The other 21 had chemotherapy treatments within the past five to 10 years, said co-author Patricia Ganz, an oncologist at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Each patient received seven positron emission tomography scans to measure blood flow during memory tasks. The study also gauged brain metabolism when the patients were at rest, Silverman said.

“The results showed that when the patients are just lying there, the women who had chemotherapy exhibited less brain activity in the frontal cortex,” Silverman said.

Other psychological tests examined short-term memory, verbal ability, judgment, abstract reasoning and visual and spatial abilities.

“The key test was the memory test,” Silverman said. “There was a jump in blood flow in those exhibiting symptoms of the chemo brain. This is because their brains have to work harder than the controls’ (brains do).”

While the study was enough to show a significant relationship between chemotherapy treatment and decreased brain metabolism, further studies would have to be conducted in this field to reach a more specific degree of knowledge, Ganz said.

“This is just a pilot study, but it is too small to make any definite conclusions on the value of chemotherapy,” Ganz said. “We have received a grant that will allow us to not only look at a larger number of people but also research other areas.”