Fig. 7.

Altered brain function in adult survivors of pediatric cancer. a Abnormal elevation in hippocampal activity during encoding of later forgotten items in n = 10 adult survivors of pediatric ALL (average age = 30.8 years; 20–30 years after treatment) relative to n = 10 matched controls (“CTL”, Monje et al. 2013). Functional neural changes were accompanied by poorer recognition memory and hippocampal atrophy in the ALL relative to control group. b Adult survivors of pediatric brain tumor (n = 17, average age = 23.39 [SD = 4.46]; 15.5 years (SD = 7.6) post diagnosis) exhibited greater activation in dmPFC, a SEN region, during a working memory paradigm (2-back condition) relative to matched controls (n = 17). Higher dmPFC activation was associated with poorer performance, suggesting an ineffective compensatory neural mechanism – similar to studies in children (Fig. 3a; King et al. 2015a). (c) Increased rsFC among frontal regions in n = 16 adult survivors of childhood cerebellar tumors (ages 17–34 years; average of 14.0 years [SD = 7.3] since diagnosis) relative to n = 16 matched controls (Chen et al. 2016). Abbreviations: ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia; SEN, salience and emotion network; rsFC, resting-state functional connectivity; dmPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. All images are adapted with permission