When it comes to Alzheimer's disease, women hold onto words for longer than men. Despite showing similar levels of brain shrinkage, new research reveals that women keep their verbal memory skills longer than men.
Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx said the latest findings suggest that women are more protected against loss of verbal memory in Alzheimer's disease.
"One way to interpret the results is that because women have better verbal memory skills than men throughout life, women have a buffer of protection against loss of verbal memory before the effects of Alzheimer's disease kick in. Because verbal memory tests are used to diagnose people with Alzheimer's disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment, these tests may fail to detect mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease in women until they are further along in the disease," lead researcher Erin E. Sundermann said in a news release.
The latest study involved 235 participants with Alzheimer's disease, 694 participants with mild cognitive impairment, and 379 participants with no memory or cognition problems. All participants were required to take a test on verbal memory and undergo brain scans.
After comparing verbal test scores with the size of the hippocampal brain region, researchers found that women with minimal to moderate hippocampal shrinkage performed significantly better than men on immediate recall and relayed recall verbal memory tests compared to their male counterparts. The same results were found in healthy participants and those with mild cognitive impairment.
However, the study revealed that there was no significant difference in verbal memory scores in participants with high levels of hippocampal shrinkage.
"Women outperformed men among individuals with moderate to larger hippocampal volume/intracranial volume ratio, but not among individuals with smaller hippocampal volume/intracranial volume ratio," researchers wrote in the study.
"Women showed an advantage in verbal memory despite evidence of moderate hippocampal atrophy. This advantage may represent a sex-specific form of cognitive reserve delaying verbal memory decline until more advanced disease stages," they concluded.
"At a public policy level, the potential health care cost for under-detection or delayed diagnosis of women with Alzheimer's disease or its early stages is staggering and should motivate funding in this area," wrote Mary Sano of Icahn School of Medicine in an accompanying editorial.
"If these results are confirmed, then we may need to adjust memory tests to account for the difference between men and women in order to improve our accuracy in diagnosis," said Sundermann.
The findings are published in the journal Neurology.
