Functional imaging of chemo-brain: usefulness of Nuclear Medicine in the fog coming after cancer

Abstract

The impact of chemotherapy on brain functionality has been widely investigated from a clinical perspective and there is a consensus on a significant impairment of multiple cognitive domains affecting cancer patients after treatment. Nuclear medicine offers a variety of biomarkers for the evaluation of possible effects of chemotherapy on the brain and for depicting brain changes after chemotherapy treatment. This review aims to summarize the most relevant findings on brain imaging in patients treated with chemotherapy for the most common oncological diseases. The literature published to date offers exciting results with several radiolabeled compounds, from the more common imaging of glucose metabolism to neuroinflammation. In this review, a general overview of the literature concerning clinical features and the physiopathological basis of chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment is reported as well.