Reproductive aging and executive functions in healthy women

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of reproductive aging on executive functions. We assessed executive functions in three groups of healthy women in the premenopausal (n = 45, mean age = 30.89, SD = 10.5), perimenopausal (n = 31, mean age = 50.06, SD = 3.6) and postmenopausal (n = 24, mean age = 63.39, SD = 6.5) phase. No differences between groups were observed in working memory, verbal fluency, inhibitory control, planning, and cognitive flexibility. However, when the analyses were repeated with participants with occupations with lower intellectual demands, perimenopausal and postmenopausal women performed worse than premenopausal women in semantic verbal fluency. This study provides important evidence to understand the effects of reproductive aging on cognitive performance in healthy women. Our findings indicate that cognitive reserve-related factors may be important to understand the differences in executive functions associated with reproductive aging.

KEYWORDS:

• Executive functions
• reproductive aging
• perimenopause
• postmenopause
• premenopause

Acknowledgments

During the development of this work, MMP has been supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO18/PDO/174), and by the Program for the Attraction of Scientific Talent of the Community of Madrid.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Comunidad de Madrid [2019-T2SOC-13464 (Awarded to MP)]; Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [FWO18/PDO/174].