Sexual dimorphism in healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment: A DTI study
PLoS ONE. 2012-07-02; 7(7): e37021
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037021
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1. PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e37021. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037021. Epub 2012 Jul 2.
Sexual dimorphism in healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment: a DTI study.
O’Dwyer L(1), Lamberton F, Bokde AL, Ewers M, Faluyi YO, Tanner C, Mazoyer B,
O’Neill D, Bartley M, Collins R, Coughlan T, Prvulovic D, Hampel H.
Author information:
(1)Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Goethe
University, Frankfurt, Germany.
Previous PET and MRI studies have indicated that the degree to which pathology
translates into clinical symptoms is strongly dependent on sex with women more
likely to express pathology as a diagnosis of AD, whereas men are more resistant
to clinical symptoms in the face of the same degree of pathology. Here we use DTI
to investigate the difference between male and female white matter tracts in
healthy older participants (24 women, 16 men) and participants with mild
cognitive impairment (21 women, 12 men). Differences between control and MCI
participants were found in fractional anisotropy (FA), radial diffusion (DR),
axial diffusion (DA) and mean diffusion (MD). A significant main effect of sex
was also reported for FA, MD and DR indices, with male control and male MCI
participants having significantly more microstructural damage than their female
counterparts. There was no sex by diagnosis interaction. Male MCIs also had
significantly less normalised grey matter (GM) volume than female MCIs. However,
in terms of absolute brain volume, male controls had significantly more brain
volume than female controls. Normalised GM and WM volumes were found to decrease
significantly with age with no age by sex interaction. Overall, these data
suggest that the same degree of cognitive impairment is associated with greater
structural damage in men compared with women.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037021
PMCID: PMC3388101
PMID: 22768288 [Indexed for MEDLINE]