Her Battle Didn’t Start with Cancer

The Black women's brain was fighting long before the biopsy

Breast cancer is not only a physiological condition; it is a neurological crisis. The disease and its treatment significantly alter brain structure and function, particularly in regions that govern attention, memory, and executive processing. For Black women, this neurological burden extends far beyond chemotherapy. Chronic racial stress, socioeconomic inequity, and cultural trauma interact with biological mechanisms to create a compounded cognitive load. This paper urgently examines the neuropsychological effects of breast cancer within the sociocultural context of Black women’s health, challenging the narrow lens of conventional biomedical research and proposing a broader, justice-oriented model of survivorship and neurorehabilitation.

Cancer research has primarily centered on cellular pathology and tumor remission, leaving the brain’s role underexplored. Chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment, commonly termed chemo brain, is now recognized as a measurable neurological condition (Kesler et al., 2017). Magnetic resonance imaging demonstrates reductions in gray-matter density within the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, areas that control attention, processing speed, and working memory. These changes appear as early as one month after treatment begins. For many women, the outcome is persistent cognitive dullness, mental fatigue, and slower executive function.