Dissociation of event-based prospective memory and time-based prospective memory in patients with prostate cancer receiving androgen-deprivation therapy: a neuropsychological study

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate the event-based prospective memory (EBPM) and time-based prospective memory (TBPM) in androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT)-induced cognitive impairment in patients with prostate cancer (PC). Participants included PC patients who had undergone ADT (ADT group, n = 43) or patients who did not undergo ADT (non-ADT group, n = 35), as well as age and education-matched healthy controls (HC group, n = 40). All participants were administered with a battery of neuropsychological tests including EBPM and TBPM tasks. Our results indicated that during the EBPM task, the ADT group obtained significantly lower scores than the non-ADT and HC group did, while no significant differences in the TBPM task scores were found among these three groups. Additionally, the ADT group demonstrated significantly lower scores in several cognitive tasks, including attention, memory, and information processing, when compared with the other two groups. This study demonstrated that PC patients receiving ADT may have selective reductions in EBPM performance but unimpaired TBPM performance and that these deficits may result from the changes of function and structure of the pre-frontal cortex induced by ADT.