TY - JOUR T1 - Peculiar cases of a “sleeping” brain in alert cancer patients JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/732230 SP - 732230 AU - Helene Benveniste AU - Paul Vaska AU - Dinko Franceschi AU - Michael Salerno AU - Sabeen Rizwan AU - Hedok Lee AU - Jean Logan AU - Douglas Rothman AU - Yuri Lazebnik AU - Nora D. Volkow AU - Thomas V. Bilfinger Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/13/732230.abstract N2 - Cognitive and constitutional symptomatology is common in cancer patients but the causes are not well understood. To investigate whether cancers cause these symptoms by changing cerebral metabolism, we measured the cerebral rate of glucose consumption (CMRglc) in patients diagnosed with a lung lesion.Methods The CMRglc was quantified in 20 patients undergoing 18F-FDG PET for lesion staging. The cognitive status was assessed by neuropsychological testing.Results Paradoxically, despite being alert three of the patients had CMRglc typical of people who are in deep sleep or anesthetized. All three had cancers, two died within 2 months of scanning. Remaining patients including four with early stage cancer had CMRglc within normal range.Conclusions We speculate that the low CMRglc reflects a switch to an alternative energy source that is mediated by cancers remotely. Identifying the underlying mechanism and the alternative energy sources may help to understand how cancers can change body metabolism. ER -