Gender Comparisons of Cognitive Performances Among Vascular Dementia, Alzheimer Disease, and Older Adults Without Dementia

Abstract

Findings support the existence of a semantic memory deficit for women with AD and suggest that a similar deficit may exist among women with VD.

Gender-specificities in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

“…Recent studies suggest that female AD patients show greater deficits on verbal fluency, naming and recall of words [10,18,19,33]. However, these studies are not comparable to the present study, as much more severely affected patients were investigated.…”

“…Several investigators provided evidence that demented men seem to retain verbal skills better than women [10]. Recent studies suggest that female AD patients show greater deficits on verbal fluency, naming and recall of words [10,18,19,33].…”

“…Some studies found that female patients with AD were significantly more impaired than males on verbal fluency [19], naming [10,19,33], and delayed recall of words [19,28]. However, other studies found no significant gender effect in language functions [6] or other cognitive domains [17,19] in AD subjects.…”

Gender Differences and Cognition Among Older Adults

“…Armstrong and Walker (1994) found that on formal verbal ability and verbal memory tests, males and females produced similar results. While finding gender differences in the performance of demented elderly participants, Buckwalter et al (1996) report no significant differences in non-demented elderly on a global screening measure, tests of visuospatial organization and construction, and a semantic naming task. Corey-Bloom et al (1996) also found there to be no gender differences in performance on their battery (global screening, verbal and visual memory tasks, category fluency, and maintaining cognitive set).…”

Gender differences in brain reserve

“…Given the strong effect of age on the incidence of dementia, women's greater susceptibility to dementia is due in large part to their greater longevity. Nevertheless, after correction for age, women remain more frequently affected by dementia than men [2]. Moreover, gender differences are not only found in neuropathology but also in cerebral glucose metabolism and blood flow [12,15].…”