Study on the deterioration of verbal memory in colon cancer patients after receiving adjuvant chemotherapy.

509 Background: Usually, patients treated with chemotherapy (CT) complain about memory loss. This was mainly studied on patients receiving adjuvant CT for breast cancer. However there are no data on adjuvant treatment of colon cancer (CC). The aim of this study is to investigate whether adjuvant CT induces in CC patients impaired memory, particularly the verbal one. Methods: 77 patients diagnosed with stage II-III CC who received adjuvant CT for 6 months with FOLFOX-4 were included between January 2008 and May 2010. Verbal memory was investigated pre-and post-treatment by the Test Barcelona. Pena-Casanova, (1990). Results: Data of 54 patients who completed the analysis pre-and post-treatment were collected. Population characteristics are: male (61%), mean age of 66, less than 5 years of education (58.3%), stage II/III (43/57%) treated with FOLFOX-4/Xeloda (85/15%). Analysis of verbal memory performance can be seen in the table. Conclusions: We found a clear verbal memory impairment after adjuvant CT in CC...