Though radiation therapy is common in the treatment of brain metastasis, it has several detrimental effects as well. It can impair important brain functions like attention span, memory or processing speed. However, a project funded by the NCI has recently shown that when brain metastases patients were treated with a drug called memantine, which has cognition protective functions, before receiving whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT), the hippocampus of the brain was protected from radiation.
As the hippocampus has been shown to be very sensitive to radiation, patients who received the advanced hippocampus protecting WBRT were less likely to develop cognitive impairments. Source: NIH, National Cancer Institute, Cancer Currents Blog
