Investigating recollection network activation during personal memory retrieval in women with chemotherapy-treated breast cancer

Poster Session C - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Kristina D. Munelith-Souksanh¹ (kmune008@uottawa.ca), Imola X. MacPhee², Chloé Cateaux¹, Amira Boukhelif¹, Julyane Gelinas¹, Megan Bennett¹, Isabelle Poirier¹, Annick F. N. Tanguay³, John A. E. Anderson², Melanie J. Sekeres¹; ¹University of Ottawa, ²Carleton University, ³Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Chemotherapy is an integral treatment for breast cancer patients (BCP), yet it is neurotoxic to the hippocampus - a key structure for event memory processing. This suggests chemotherapy treatment may interfere with memory recollection network activity during complex event memory processes. However, this has not been well investigated in BCP. This study evaluates network activation in a preliminary sample of chemotherapy-treated BCP (n=11) relative to healthy controls (n=11) using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with a naturalistic Autobiographical Memory Task (AMT). Before fMRI scanning, participants provided personal event titles (i.e., a family dinner) for 4 different timepoints (5 years, 1 year, and 1 week ago; 1 year in the future). Participants were scanned 2 weeks later and asked to mentally retrieve 10 personal events for each timepoint. Following scanning, participants verbally recalled the personal events outside the scanner while being recorded. The recordings were then transcribed and used for further analysis. Preliminary results using partial least squares (PLS) analysis revealed that the activation of the recollection and attention networks were less differentiated for BCP than healthy control participants for the personal memories from 1 year ago and 1 year in the future, despite providing a similar number of perceptual details on the personal memory verbal recall for each timepoint. Further analyses will examine the relationship between episodic memory performance and activation of the networks identified by PLS. This will help precisely identify targets for cognitive rehabilitation strategies and ultimately improve the quality of life of BCP.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic