Neuropsychological Performance and Its Predictors in the Early Treatment Phase of Non-CNS Pediatric Cancer

Background: Pediatric cancer survivors can experience neuropsychological problems in the long term. Less is known about neuropsychological performance and its possible predictors in the early treatment phase of non-central nervous system (CNS) cancers. Procedure: This study describes the neuropsychological performance of 104 children with leukemia (n = 43), lymphoma (n = 29), or a non-CNS solid tumor (n = 33) aged 5–18 years at diagnosis (M = 11.78, SD = 3.71, 48% female), 4.52 months (SD = 0.77) after diagnosis. Using one-sample t-tests, measures of IQ, attention, memory, working memory, verbal fluency, processing speed, and reading were compared to age-matched norm scores. Individual comparisons were performed with paired t-tests, comparing participants’ neuropsychological scores to their estimated IQ (EIQ). Multiple regression analyses related medical factors, pre-existing developmental vulnerabilities, and family psychosocial risk to neuropsychological outcomes, corrected for age at diagnosis, sex, and EIQ. Results: EIQ was significantly above the population mean (M = 105.25, SD = 12.15, p  0.05) in multivariable models. In a follow-up analysis, family psychosocial risk was related to memory (p