Increased Speed on Objective Neuropsychological Tests Following Chemotherapy is Not a Result of Increased Error
Mentor 1
Adam Greenberg
Start Date
28-4-2023 12:00 AM
Description
Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy often experience some degree of cognitive decline, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “chemobrain”. The FACT-Cog is a self-report, neuropsychological questionnaire that can be administered pre- and post-chemotherapy to assess the presence of subjective cognitive deficits that patients experience. This tool is often used in conjunction with other, more objective, neuropsychological tests to gain a better overall understanding of whether a patient has experienced cognitive decline following chemotherapy. In order to determine the degree of consistency between self-report and objective neuropsychological measures, we compared patient FACT-Cog scores to their scores on 4 objective neuropsychological tests (trail-making, digit span, color-word, and Ruff 2 and 7). In the service of quantifying the relationship between FACT-Cog and objective test scores, we searched for evidence of a speed-accuracy tradeoff by conducting error analyses on the scores of the color-word test. Longitudinal color-word data showed that as a group, post-chemotherapy performance was significantly better than pre-chemotherapy performance on all four color-word conditions. However, the metric used to assess performance is solely based on time needed to complete each condition and doesn’t take accuracy into account. We compared the rate of error to the speed of completion for each individual and compared these ratios to the mean rate of error with a goal of determining whether this improved speed post-chemotherapy came at the expense of decreased accuracy. The data show that most participants did not error on these tests and there is no significant difference in errors pre- and post-chemotherapy across the conditions. This indicates that the improved speed observed at the second time point was not related to an increased rate of error and leaves open the possibility of more experimentation to determine the cause of the observed speed improvement.
Increased Speed on Objective Neuropsychological Tests Following Chemotherapy is Not a Result of Increased Error
Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy often experience some degree of cognitive decline, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “chemobrain”. The FACT-Cog is a self-report, neuropsychological questionnaire that can be administered pre- and post-chemotherapy to assess the presence of subjective cognitive deficits that patients experience. This tool is often used in conjunction with other, more objective, neuropsychological tests to gain a better overall understanding of whether a patient has experienced cognitive decline following chemotherapy. In order to determine the degree of consistency between self-report and objective neuropsychological measures, we compared patient FACT-Cog scores to their scores on 4 objective neuropsychological tests (trail-making, digit span, color-word, and Ruff 2 and 7). In the service of quantifying the relationship between FACT-Cog and objective test scores, we searched for evidence of a speed-accuracy tradeoff by conducting error analyses on the scores of the color-word test. Longitudinal color-word data showed that as a group, post-chemotherapy performance was significantly better than pre-chemotherapy performance on all four color-word conditions. However, the metric used to assess performance is solely based on time needed to complete each condition and doesn’t take accuracy into account. We compared the rate of error to the speed of completion for each individual and compared these ratios to the mean rate of error with a goal of determining whether this improved speed post-chemotherapy came at the expense of decreased accuracy. The data show that most participants did not error on these tests and there is no significant difference in errors pre- and post-chemotherapy across the conditions. This indicates that the improved speed observed at the second time point was not related to an increased rate of error and leaves open the possibility of more experimentation to determine the cause of the observed speed improvement.
