Sex differences in memory As a first step toward profiling the neurocognitive deficits in schizophrenia we needed to establish a normative database of individuals who received the entire battery. While individual tests in the battery have each been standardized on differing normative samples, a rigorous characterization of any clinical population requires that both patients and controls be given the entire instrument under the same test configuration. When we compared the profile of men and women,

we noted similar BMN-673 performance in the executive domain of abstraction and mental flexibility and attention, but in verbal Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical memory females outperformed males by a substantial margin (Figure 1). Figure 1. Sex differences. A. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Sex differences in neurocognitive profile. ABF, abstraction and mental flexibility; ATT, attention; VMEM, verbal memory; SMEM, spatial memory; LAN, language reasoning; SPA, spatial processing; SEN, sensory; MOT, motor speed. B. Sex … The advantage of females in verbal memory was clearly evident at the rate at which they learned a new word list. They remembered more words after the first exposure to the list, and this Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical advantage was maintained after repeated exposures and throughout efforts to elicit recollection. Notably, item recognition

at the conclusion of testing was nearly identical for males and females. The males correctly recognized the words that they were exposed to when asked to pick them out from new Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical words. However, they had less access to them, compared with females, when attempting to recollect the word list. In contrast to the better performance on word memory, females did not differ from males in spatial memory. This could relate to their poorer performance in spatial tasks. For example, as can be seen in Figure 1, their performance on a spatial processing test was below that of males. The advent of functional neuroimaging has enabled a systematic investigation of neural Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical substrates for these sex differences in verbal memory. Initial studies of regional cerebral blood flow have revealed that, in addition to better LANCET verbal memory, women have higher rates of resting regional

cerebral blood flow. We examined whether there are sex differences in the relationship between verbal episodic memory and resting cerebral blood flow.16 Twenty-eight healthy right-handed participants (14 male, 14 female) underwent a neuropsychological evaluation and a positron emission tomography (PET) [15]0-water study. Immediate and delayed recall was measured on the logical memory subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale – Revised, and on the California Verbal Learning Test. Resting cerebral blood flow (mL/100 g/min) was calculated for four frontal, four temporal, and four limbic regions of interest. Women had better immediate recall on both tasks. Sex differences in cerebral blood flow were found for temporal lobe regions.