Gender Differences in Cognitive Dysfunction in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

he clinical manifestations of MDD are not limited to mood symptoms, but also include a range of cognitive and motor symptoms. Thus, MDD is considered a multifactorial disorder which varies in terms of symptom severity, psychiatric co-morbidity, and clinical course, including recurrence and response to treatment (Seok et al., 2012). In the last years, cognitive impairment in depression has been widely reported. It is clear that cognitive symptoms persist after remission of psychopathological symptoms but little is known about the pathophysiological events linking depression and cognitive impairment. Novel biological, structural and functional neuroimaging techniques have allowed a better definition of this relation. Depression and cognitive dysfunction share a common neuropathological platform in cortical and sub-cortical brain areas implicated in emotional and cognitive processing which may be under the control of genetic and environmental factors (Lam et al., 2014). Cognitive gender differences are still reported, typically with a life-long advantage for men in tasks assessing visuospatial (Voyer et al., 1995) and mathematical abilities (Halpern et al., 2007), whereas women are often found to outperform men in tasks assessing episodic memory and reading literacy (Pauls et al., 2013). In other cognitive tasks, such as category fluency and vocabulary, gender differences are