A gender bias toward women in verbal memory may be robbing them of an opportunity to treat and address issues associated with Alzheimer's in the disease's early stages.
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine examined three groups for the memory loss study: a group whose members were diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia, a group with "mild cognitive impairment," and a control group. More than 1,200 individuals were included in the study.
The objective was to determine whether the well-known advantage women in verbal memory skills have compared to men deprived them of early treatment opportunities.
Recommended For You
What the researchers found was, because a woman's superior verbal memory skills masks the early stages of Alzheimer's, women are not being diagnosed as early as men. The result: Existing therapies for memory loss aren't applied at the very stage where they work the best.
How did they know what was going on? Researchers studied the hippocampi of those involved, and discovered that women's hippocampi were shrinking at a rate similar to men's in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Thus the disease was already in progress, obscured by the female's better verbal recall capabilities.
"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," the study concluded.
Researchers offered several suggestions, including developing finer screening and assessment tests that factor out the female verbal memory superiority.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
