Second Department of Psychiatry, Attikon General Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Medical School, Athens, Greece.
Second Department of Psychiatry, Attikon General Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Medical School, Athens, Greece.
Psychiatry Res. 2018 Sep;267:499-505. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2018.06.037. Epub 2018 Jun 21.
Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with cognitive deficits in attention, verbal memory and executive functions. However, only few studies have examined sex effects on cognition despite their clinical relevance. Given that visual memory/ learning has been understudied the aim of our study was to investigate sex-related variation in cognition (executive functions and visual memory/ learning) in BD. Cognitive performance of 60 bipolar-I patients and 30 healthy controls was evaluated by using CANTAB battery tasks targeting spatial memory (SRM), paired associative learning (PAL) and executive functions. We fitted a multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), followed by task-specific ANCOVAs. A significant diagnosis by sex interaction effect was detected (MANCOVA); specifically, diagnosis-specific sex effects were found for SRM and PAL, as healthy males outperformed healthy females but this pattern was attenuated in BD patients. Patients' clinicodemographic characteristics, current psychopathology or medication status did not differ across sexes and were, therefore, unlikely to explain detected sex effects. Our study is one of few studies to assess sex-related variation in cognition in BD and the first to record a diagnosis-specific sex effect for two tasks of visuo-spatial memory/ learning, indicating that sex-related variation in healthy subjects is disrupted in BD.
双相情感障碍（BD）与注意力、言语记忆和执行功能的认知缺陷有关。然而，尽管这些认知缺陷具有临床相关性，但仅有少数研究探讨了性别对认知的影响。鉴于视觉记忆/学习的研究较少，我们的研究旨在调查 BD 患者中认知（执行功能和视觉记忆/学习）的性别差异。我们使用 CANTAB 电池任务评估了 60 名双相情感障碍患者和 30 名健康对照组的认知表现，这些任务针对空间记忆（SRM）、成对联想学习（PAL）和执行功能。我们进行了多元协方差分析（MANCOVA），然后进行了特定任务的协方差分析。检测到诊断与性别的交互效应显著（MANCOVA）；具体来说，在 SRM 和 PAL 中发现了与诊断相关的性别效应，健康男性的表现优于健康女性，但这种模式在 BD 患者中减弱。患者的临床人口统计学特征、当前的精神病理学或药物状况在性别之间没有差异，因此不太可能解释检测到的性别效应。我们的研究是为数不多的评估 BD 中认知性别差异的研究之一，也是第一个记录两个视觉空间记忆/学习任务的特定诊断性别效应的研究，表明健康受试者中与性别相关的认知差异在 BD 中受到干扰。
