Home-based cognitive rehabilitation in brain tumor patients: Feasibility of the evidence-based ReMind program

Objective: Many patients with primary brain tumors suffer from
cognitive deficits. Treatment options for these deficits are scarce,
time-consuming and costly. Recent studies showed promising results
on the efficacy of cognitive rehabilitation in these patients. Also, the
cognitive rehabilitation program (CRP) developed by our group
proved effective in an RCT. To increase its accessibility, it was
converted into the app-based CRP ReMind. We performed a pilot
study to evaluate feasibility and patient experience of this new
method of training.
Participants and Methods: Prior to surgery, 15 patients with a
presumed meningioma or low-grade glioma were included in this
study. The CRP ReMind incorporated both retraining of attention and
practicing of compensational strategies of attention, memory and
executive functioning. Patients started 3 months after neurosurgery
and spent several hours per week on the program for 10 weeks.
Neuropsychological assessments were conducted one day before
surgery, 3 months after surgery (i.e. before starting the program) and
6 months after surgery (i.e. immediately after finishing the program).
At all time-points, questionnaires on psychosocial and subjective
cognitive functioning were administered to patients and caregivers.
Results: Feasibility (i.e. percentages of interested, adhered and
dropped-out patients) and patient experience will be presented. Also,
results of paired t-tests will be presented for a first impression of
possible changes in cognitive functioning and patient-reported
outcomes (PROs).
Conclusions: This is the first study that provides evidence-based
cognitive rehabilitation via a tablet-app in brain tumor patients. An
RCT on the effects of ReMind on cognitive functioning and PROs is
forth-coming.