Probiotic supplement attenuates chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment in patients with breast cancer: a randomised, double-blind, and placebo-controlled trial.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Copper (Supplement) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To date, the management of CRCI remains a clinical challenge.

Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR-INQ-17014181) [http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=24294].

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 159 patients taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, women only.

The researchers conducted a randomised, double-blind and placebo-controlled trial (ChiCTR-INQ-17014181) of 159 patients with breast cancer and further investigated the underlying mechanism in a pre-clinical setting.

From 2018 to 2019, patients with breast cancer (Stage I-III) who needed adjuvant chemotherapy were screened, enrolled and randomly assigned to receive either probiotics or placebo (three capsules, twice/day) during chemotherapy.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this Copper (Supplement) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

As a double-blind Copper (Supplement) study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Copper (Supplement) group a baseline to be compared against.

Their cognition, anxiety and depression were assessed with well-established assays; their plasma biomarkers, metabolites and faecal microbiota compositions were measured.

In addition, the systemic effects of the metabolites found in the clinical trial on long-term potentiation, synapse injury, oxidative stress and glial activation were assessed in rats.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Breast Neoplasms, Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Impairment and Probiotics.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Breast cancer, Chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) and p-Mentha-1,8-dien-7-ol.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Copper (Supplement) in 159 patients.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2022 (European journal of cancer (Oxford, England : 1990)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Copper (Supplement) compound page, all human trials.