Study on impairment of verbal fluency in patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer after chemotherapy / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the changes of verbal fluency test(VFT) in patients with castration resistant prostate cancer(CRPC) after chemotherapy.Methods 61 patients with CRPC were recruited.Thirty-one of those patients voluntarily accepted chemotherapy as CT group.The other thirty patients who did not received chemotherapy served as control group.CT group underwent VFT assessments at 3 time points:pre-chemotherapy (T1),during-chemotherapy (T2) and post-chemotherapy (T3).Patients in the control group were also assessed at the same time.Results (1) In phonetic fluency tasks,the interaction of time and group (time×group) between the CT group and control group was insignificant in the aspects of word capacity,cluster size,mean cluster size and phonetic switches(P＞0.05).The effect of time between the CT group and control group was significant difference in word capacity,cluster size,mean cluster size and phonetic switches(P＜0.05),but the effect of group was not significant(P＞0.05).CT group and control group both produced more words at T2 and T3 compared with that at T1 (P＜0.05).CT group had a lower score in cluster size and average cluster size than that of the control group at T3 ((6.17 ± 2.71) vs (7.64 ± 2.36),(3.14±0.78)vs (4.28± 1.53),P＜0.05).(2)In semantic fluency tasks,the interaction of time and group (time×group) between the CT group and control group was insignificant in the aspects of word capacity,cluster size,mean cluster size and semantic switches(P＞0.05).The effect of time between the CT group and control group was significantly different in word capacity,cluster size and semantic switches(P＜0.05),but the effects of groups and the effect of time in mean cluster were not significantly different(P＞0.05).The control group produced more words at T2 and T3 than T1 (P＜0.05).The CT group had a smaller cluster size at T3 than T1 and T2,and it was aslo smaller than control Group(P＜0.05).CT group had smaller cluster size at T3 than T2 ((5.47± 1.28) vs (7.15± 1.49),P＜ 0.05).At T3,the semantic switches of the CT group were more than T1,but less than control Group((20.81 ±3.63) vs (19.36±4.84) vs (21.54±6.18),P＜ 0.05)).The semantic switches of CT group were less at T2 than T1 ((18.25±4.25) vs (19.36±4.84),(P＜0.05)).Conclusion Standard dose chemotherapy has no significant impairment on the verbal fluency of patients with CRPC.Chemotherapy does not induce the impairment of patients' phonetic fluency,but may have a negative influence on semantic fluency.