Our study has some limitations: a small sample of patients and a
cross-sectional design. Large scale longitudinal studies evaluating
the link between potential posterior hippocampal atrophy and
episodic autobiographical memory performances of breast cancer
patients are needed. Also, we did not assess the effect of each
specific treatment, concerning the results, we thus do not exclude
the influence of the treatment itself even though first studies on
chemotherapy (which is the most invasive part of the treatment)
show no adverse effect on hippocampal volume of breast cancer
survivors [30]. Four of our patient group had an hormonotherapy
treatment. One could hypothesis an effect of hormonotherapy in
our results; however, when using the presence of hormonotherapy
as covariate in the analysis, we observed a very significant between
group difference in the hippocampus volume