Overcoming Chemobrain with NeurOptimal Neurofeedback

Jean Alvarez shares her story of overcoming the neurological issues associated with cancer and cancer treatment ("chemobrain") and how she used NeurOptimal neurofeedback to overcome it.

Learn more at: http://clevelandneurofeedback.com/

Hello, my name is Jean Alvarez and I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000. For nine months after that I was in treatment.   It was a challenging experience, but I’m a pretty positive person, and I had my eye on the end, when my hair would grow back, food would begin to taste good again, and my life would return to normal.

A few months after my last chemo treatment, I began to realize that things weren’t getting better—in fact I was worse in many ways:
• After a lifetime of sleeping easily and for long hours, I had severe insomnia—taking several hours to fall asleep, and being unable to return to sleep if I woke during the night.
• Fatigue began to feel like it would never end.
• Cognitive problems became undeniable.  I worked as a consultant to a not-for-profit organizations and started to be afraid I’d have to stop working.
• The big blast of depression that many of us experience as treatment ends had settled in as a long-term, low-grade depression.
I continued to talk with my oncologist and other physicians, who were all wonderful and supportive and tried several medications they thought might help, but there is no treatment that’s generally successful with these symptoms, and so I struggled on with no improvement.

Eventually I got clear that all of my symptoms were brain-related. Though I’m a social psychologist with no particular expertise in the brain, I was energized by having a way to think about what had happened to me and having a field I could read about in hopes of figuring out how to recover. That reading led me to two wonderful learnings:
1. First, unlike what neuroscientists used to think the brain is not “hard-wired”—it is changeable, or “plastic,” throughout the life span. This means that damage that has happened during cancer and cancer treatment ought to be correctable…if only we can find an effective intervention.
2. EEG biofeedback (neurofeedback) is a technology that uses information about the brain’s electrical activity to activate the brain’s plasticity. With this technology, the brain is able to become aware of what it is doing…and then make changes to function more efficiently, more effectively.

My first experience with a fairly traditional neurofeedback approach, while fun and interesting, did not improve my symptoms, but did convince me that neurofeedback is a powerful technology. My next experience, with a neurofeedback program called NeurOptimal, was incredible.

• In 3 sessions, my sleep was clearly normalizing
• In 10 sessions, the depression was gone. I heard myself laugh one day and thought, “This is joy—I haven’t felt this in seven years!”
• With the changes in sleep and mood, my fatigue began to improve

And more slowly—but unquestionably—my cognitive function was getting better.

As you can imagine, I was ecstatic, and relieved to feel confident in my work again.  But I come from a family of scientists, and I found that I couldn’t be comfortable just going back to life as usual.  I wanted to know whether I was a unique, lucky person whose brain responded to neurofeedback, or whether this approach might offer a solution to the thousands of other cancer survivors facing the same problems I had struggled with.

And so I purchased my own equipment, and with some colleagues, designed a study on 23 breast cancer survivors experiencing chemobrain symptoms following treatment, measuring cognitive impairment, fatigue, sleep impairment and emotional distress—particularly anxiety and depression

A quick summary:  before neurofeedback, the participants showed serious dysfunction on all measures compared with a normal population; But after 20 sessions with NeurOptimal, our participants were similar to the normal population on any the sleep, emotional, fatigue, and three of the four cognitive testing scales that we measured.

I was excited about these results. To the best of my knowledge, neurofeedback is the only “restorative intervention;” that is, an approach that actually corrects what has gone wrong in the brain, restoring it to its pre-cancer level of functioning.

I know firsthand what it’s like to expect to return to normal once your treatment is over—and know how terrible it is when that doesn’t happen. Based on all I know and learned, NeurOptimal can almost always facilitate that return to normal.

If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to me at the number on the screen, or visit Clevelandneurofeedback.com to learn more. If you’re suffering through chemobrain, it’s my hope that you have NeurOptimal a try. There’s not much to lose, and a whole lot to gain!