Depression Involved in the Chemotherapy Induced Event-based Prospective Memory Impairment in Breast Cancer Survivors

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between depression and occurrence of chemotherapy induced prospective memory impairment in patients with breast cancer (BC).The 63 BC patients before and after chemotherapy were administered with the self-rating depression scale (SDS) and a battery of cognitive neuropsychological tests including event-based and time-based prospective memory (EBPM and TBPM, respectively) tasks. The changes in their prospective memory and cognitive neuropsychological characteristics before and after chemotherapy were compared. Compared with the scores before chemotherapy, the EBPM score exhibited a statistically significant difference after chemotherapy (t = 6.069, P < 0.01), while the TBPM score showed no significant difference (t = 1.087, P > 0.05). Further, compared with the patients without depression, the patients with depression exhibited a statistically significant difference in the EBPM score (t = -4.348, P < 0.01), while the TBPM scores did not show a statistically significant difference between the two groups (t = -1.260, P > 0.05). Post-chemotherapy, EBPM and overall cognitive functions in BC patients merged with depression were found to decline, while TBPM did not show a significant change, suggesting that the combination of chemotherapy and depression might be related with the occurrence of post-chemotherapy EBPM impairment. Keywords— Breast cancer, depression, cognitive impairment, prospective memory.