Prospective memory impairment in chemotherapy-exposed early breast cancer survivors: Preliminary evidence from a clinical test

ABSTRACT

We report the results of a secondary analysis of a cross-sectional study (Paquet et al., 2013 Paquet, L., Collins, B., Song, X., Chinneck, A., Bedard, M., & Verma, S. (2013). A pilot study of prospective memory functioning in early breast cancer survivors. Breast, 22 (4), 455–461.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to evaluate the cognitive operations involved in prospective memory (PM) deficits exhibited by chemotherapy-exposed breast cancer (BC) survivors. PM was assessed with the memory for intentions screening test administered to 80 patients and 80 healthy controls. Patients performed worse than controls on the PM tasks and had more “omission” errors (indices of the prospective component of the tasks) than the controls. No group differences emerged on a recognition test. Although further studies will be needed to disentangle the multiple cognitive operations involved in PM, these findings are consistent with the notion that self-initiated retrieval processes rather than encoding are implicated in PM impairment among BC survivors.