Influence of gender and age on cognitive inhibition in late‐onset depression: a case‐control study

Abstract

Cognitive inhibition impairment, and more specifically its attention component, was the main characteristic of depression in the studied sample of older adults, independently of gender and age of depression onset. It is essential to perform similar studies in both genders in view of future tailor-made therapeutic modalities.

The Role of Baseline Cognitive Function in the Neurocognitive Effects of Electroconvulsive Therapy in Depressed Elderly Patients

“…In our previous study , we found that the BVMT-R was among the tests that showed the least sensitivity to cognitive side effects from T1 to T2. Our results are in line with previous studies of patients with geriatric depression reporting weak results on the inhibition part of the Stroop test (Richard-Devantoy, Deguigne, Annweiler, Letourneau, & Beauchet, 2013), as well as on the TMT B (King, Cox, Lyness, & Caine, 1995). A slow processing speed has been pointed out as a confounder of the validity of the BVMT-R (Tam & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2013) as a measure of memory.…”

Does gender influence cognitive function in non-psychotic depression?

“…Our results expand those preliminary indications, suggesting that women with depression have more severe impairment than men, across multiple cognitive domains, even in the absence of psychotic symptoms. The other three published studies on this topic, which did not find sex differences in neuropsychological measures, are not comparable to ours as they investigated different cognitive domains such as attention and cognitive inhibition [23] or they addressed emotional aspects of cognitive functioning, namely emotional working memory [24] and autobiographical memory recall [25].…”

“…We investigated the influence of gender on neuropsychological performance in a sample of inpatients with current MDD without psychotic features who were hospitalized for a psychiatric rehabilitation program. Previous findings regarding the differences in cognitive function between men and women with depression are scant, mixed, and insufficient to draw conclusions [23][24][25][26].…”

“…Conversely, only a few studies have compared the cognitive performance of women and men with MDD, providing mixed results, probably because of the heterogeneity of the samples and neuropsychological measures that were utilized. A small sample of older women with late-onset (LO) severe depression without psychotic symptoms and receiving psychotropic medications exhibited greater impairment in attention and verbal components of cognitive inhibition than healthy women, but did not differ from older men with LO depression [23]. No significant sex differences in emotional working memory were found in a small sample of drug-free patients with mild-moderate depression [24].…”

A meta-analysis of cognitive performance in melancholic versus non-melancholic unipolar depression

“…Nonetheless, MDD subjects seem to display a wide range of cognitive deficits -ranging from no impairment to extreme impairment -depending on the effect of different factors, such as age (Herrmann et al, 2007), gender (Richard-Devantoy et al, 2013), education level (Elgamal et al, 2007), recurrence of episodes (Gorwood et al, 2008), symptom severity (McClintock et al, 2010) and antidepressant treatment (Rosenblat et al, 2015). The study of cognitive performance in MDD is made even more complex by the fact that different depressive subtypes, such as psychotic, atypical and melancholic features, have shown specific effects on cognition (Exner et al, 2009;Fleming et al, 2004;Lin et al, 2014;Markela-Lerenc et al, 2006;Michopoulos et al, 2008;Pier et al, 2004;Quinn et al, 2012a;Quinn et al, 2012b;Roca et al, 2015;Rush et al, 1983;Withall et al, 2010;Zaninotto et al, 2015).…”