Radiation- induced cognitive impairments

Introduction: Ionizing radiation is non-surgical treatment of brain tumors and metastases. Preclinical studies have showed main insights into harmful effects of radiation on the nervous system in vivo and in vitro. Cognitive impairment such as progressive memory, executive and attention performance deficits indicates a significant risk for patients experiencing conventional radiotherapy. Changes in hippocampus-dependent cognition often state radiation-induced cognitive destruction. Radiation-induced brain injury can impair neuronal, glial and vascular parts of the brain and may cause to molecular, cellular and functional alterations.   Materials and Method: In order to investigate this topic, the articles were searched for in the following bibliographic database: PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct and Google scholar and among the words used when searching were: cranial irradiation, cognitive impairment.   Results and Conclusion: To avoid of the hippocampus impairment in cranial irradiating, whereas allowing for same dose sending to the remainder of the brain, poses severe challenges given the central position and unique anatomic shape of the hippocampus. Recently, previous studies showed that the ability of modern intensity-modulated radiotherapy methods, like LINAC-based intensity-modulated radiotherapy and helical tomotherapy, to permit for the delivery of extremely conformal dose distributions.