Reproductive Aging and Executive Functions in Healthy Women

PABLO, MARTINO; CERVIGNI MAURICO; MATIAS PULOPULOS; AUDISIO EDUARDO ÓSCAR; JOSE BONET; DE BORTOLI MIGUEL ANGEL; DANIEL POLITIS

AGING NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITION

Taylor & Francis

Lugar: London; Año: 2020

1744-4128

ABSTRACTPrevious research suggests that reproductive aging in women may have a strong influence oncognitive performance in adult women. Moreover, it has been proposed that perimenopausewould especially affect executive functions. However, the influence of reproductive aging inexecutive functions such as planning, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility has not beeninvestigated. The objective of this cross-sectional study was to analyze the influence ofreproductive aging on executive functions. We assessed executive functions in three groups ofhealthy 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 observedin working memory, verbal fluency, inhibitory control, planning, and cognitive flexibility.However, when the analyses were repeated with participants with occupations with lowerintellectual demands, perimenopausal and postmenopausal women performed worse thanpremenopausal women in semantic verbal fluency. These differences were not observed in thegroup of participants with occupations with higher intellectual demands. In conclusion, thisstudy provides important evidence to understand the effects of reproductive aging on cognitiveperformance in healthy women. Our findings indicate that cognitive reserve-related factors maybe important to understand the differences in executive functions associated with reproductiveaging