REPRODUCTIVE AGING AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS IN HEALTHY WOMEN

MARTINO, PABLO; CERVIGNI MAURICIO; PULÓPULOS MATÍAS ; AUDISIO EDUARDO; BONET JOSÉ ; DE BORTOLI MIGUEL ÁNGEL; POLITIS DANIEL

Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition

Taylor & Francis, Inc.

Lugar: London; Año: 2022 vol. 29 p. 181 - 196

1382-5585

Previous research suggests that reproductive aging in women may have a strong influence on cognitive performance in adult women. Moreover, it has been proposed that perimenopause would especially affect executive functions. However, the influence of reproductive aging in executive functions such as planning, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility has not been investigated. The objective of this cross-sectional study was to analyze the influence of reproductive aging on executive functions. We assessed executive functions in three groups of healthy women in the premenopausal (n=45, mean age=30.89, SD=10.5), perimenopausal(n=31, mean age=50.06, SD=3.6) and postmenopausal (n=24, mean age=63.39, SD=6.5) phase. The analyses were performed controlling for age. No differences between groups were observed in working memory, verbal fluency, inhibitory control, planning, and cognitive flexibility. However, when the analyses were repeated with participants with occupations with lower intellectual demands, perimenopausal and postmenopausal women performed worse than premenopausal women in semantic verbal fluency. These differences were not observed in the group of participants with occupations with higher intellectual demands. In conclusion, this study provides important evidence to understand the effects of reproductive aging on cognitiveperformance in healthy women. Our findings indicate that cognitive reserve-related factors may be important to understand the differences in executive functions associated with reproductive aging.