Cognitive functioning in men receiving androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis. By McGinty et al. 2014
Key sentence from the paper: “Prostate cancer patients who received ADT performed significantly worse on visuomotor tasks compared to noncancer control group.”
For the full abstract, see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24859915
Commentary: It’s been a controversy about whether ADT affects the way men think. A fair number of studies have looked at what we called cognitive function, which includes remembering facts and processing information. This is the latest review on the topic and it is quite an impressive paper. The bottom line is that patients on ADT perform worse on “visuomotor tasks” compared to non-cancer control group. But what the paper did not say is what that means in everyday life of prostate cancer patients. In simple term, visuomotor tasks include how we navigate our way through the three-dimensional world, and problems in this domain can show up at a large range of scales. Trying to find some papers that you left on a messy desk can be a real life visuomotor challenge. Finding your car in a large parking lot can also be a visuomotor challenge. If you can’t remember in which aisle in a supermarket has your favourite jar of olives, it may not be senility that is challenging you; it may be ADT.
McGinty HL, Phillips KM, Jim HS, Cessna JM, Asvat Y, Cases MG, Small BJ, Jacobsen PB. 2014. Cognitive functioning in men receiving androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Supportive Care in Cancer 22(8):2271-2280.