Lillian Hassan-Thomas, “The Influence of Practice Effects during Neuropsychological Testing of Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment”
Mentor: Adam Greenberg, Medical College of Wisconsin
Poster #91

Patients being treated for cancer with chemotherapy often experience Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI) which can cause a range of behavioral impacts including reduction in memory, concentration, motor skills, language, etc. Our lab recently tested a cohort of CRCI patients of various ages, education backgrounds, and cancer types in a longitudinal design with assorted delays between their pre-chemotherapy and post-chemotherapy assessments. These data yielded an unexpected result: while patients reported (via a validated self-report questionnaire) decreased cognitive functioning after chemotherapy, their scores on objective neuropsychological tests actually improved during this same period. Here, we seek to determine if this unexpected result was caused by an artifact of repeated administration of the tests, causing an artificial inflation of scores over time. We will examine the normative data for each neuropsychological test used to determine whether these clinically validated tests are susceptible to practice effects. Additionally, we will longitudinally test a sample of healthy volunteers at various test-retest intervals which we will use to “correct” for practice effects influencing our preliminary data and masking any observable objective cognitive dysfunction in our CRCI patients. We predict that the normative neuropsychological test data will indicate the presence of practice effects when administered at the same test-retest intervals as in our preliminary study. Additionally, we expect the healthy individuals to show improvement on the neuropsychological tests over time (i.e., a practice effect), but to a greater degree than the CRCI patients. The difference obtained by subtracting the healthy volunteer improvement from the CRCI patient improvement will indicate the true amount of underlying cognitive dysfunction experienced by the CRCI patients.