White matter hyperintensity volumes are related to processing speed in long-term survivors of childhood cerebellar tumors

Abstract

Purpose Across several clinical populations, higher white matter hyperintensity (WMH) burden is consistently associated with decreases in cognitive performance, especially processing speed. Research of childhood cancer survivors has not utilized WMH quantification methodology to better understand the impact of WMH burden and its relationship with core cognitive skills. The present study aimed to quantify WMH volumes in a sample of long-term survivors of childhood cerebellar tumor and investigate the relationships with performance on a measure of oral processing speed. To further explore brain–behavior relationships, multivariate sparse canonical correlations was employed to identify WMH areas that predict processing speed performance. Methods Thirty-five survivors and 56 healthy controls underwent neuroimaging and completed a measure of oral processing speed. The survivor group was further divided based on treatment (i.e., chemoradiation therapy (n = 20) vs. surgery only (n = 15)) to better understand the impact of treatment. Results Survivors, and especially those treated with chemoradiation therapy, showed higher total WMH volumes and slower processing speed. Higher total WMH volumes were significantly associated with poorer processing speed (r = − 0.492, p = 0.003). Multivariate brain–behavior relationships revealed that periventricular WMHs were significantly associated with slower processing speed performance (p < 0.05). Conclusion Results exemplify that long-term survivors treated with and without chemoradiation therapy are at increased risk of developing higher WMH volumes compared to healthy peers. In addition, processing speed was robustly shown to be related to periventricular WMHs using an automated neuroimaging pipeline. This methodology to monitor WMH burden has the potential to be implemented efficiently with routine clinical neuroimaging of cancer survivors.