Greater cognitive deterioration in women than men with Alzheimer's disease: A meta analysis

Abstract

Studies reporting on the cognitive abilities of men and women with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are surprisingly rare. We carried out a meta-analysis of neurocognitive data from 15 studies (n = 828 men; 1,238 women), which revealed a consistent male advantage on verbal and visuospatial tasks and tests of episodic and semantic memory. Moderator regression analyses showed that age, education level, and dementia severity did not significantly predict the male advantage. Reasons posited for this advantage include a reduction of estrogen in postmenopausal women, sex differences in AD pathology, and greater cognitive reserve in men.

Keywords:

• Alzheimer's disease
• Cognition
• Verbal abilities
• Visuospatial abilities
• Sex differences

Notes

¹As a rough estimate, we entered “sex difference” AND “language” AND “significant” into Scopus for title, abstract, and keywords for the past 10 years—this produced approximately 1,000 hits; entering “nonsignificant” instead of “significant” produced 10 hits.