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Cost of Cancer
19 March 2014

Cost of Cancer

They say that an elephant never forgets but it’s really the seahorse that has the best memory. At least when talking about neuroscience that is. The hippocampus – latin for seahorse – is a brain region bearing a resemblance to its underwater namesake that’s key to our ability to remember. Due to this important function, it’s a central focus of research into why treating cancers of the nervous system often leaves patients with poorer information recall. For example, years after gruelling therapy for a childhood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), adult survivors suffer a variety of cognitive defects, including poor visual scene recognition. Here yellow and red represent activity levels in the hippocampus of ALL survivors (right pair) and unaffected individuals (left pair) engaging in memory tasks, showing the physical manifestation of this problem. Beating cancer, it seems, comes at a price.

Written by Jan Piotrowski

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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