Gender differences on a brief measure of cognitive functioning in Alzheimer's disease
J. G. Buckwalter, E. Sobel, M. E. Dunn, M. M. Diz and V. W. Henderson
Ethal Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90033-1084.
OBJECTIVE--We evaluated scores on a brief psychometric screening
instrument--the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE)--for possible effects
of gender, hypothesizing that women with Alzheimer's disease (AD) would
perform more poorly than men. A significant gender difference was to be
explored with post hoc item analyses. DESIGN--Case-study design. A
hierarchical regression procedure controlled for the possible influence on
MMSE performance of demographic variables (eg, age, duration of dementia
symptoms, education, and family history of dementia) before the effect of
gender was analyzed. SETTING--Data were gathered by trained
neuropsychological examiners from subjects enrolled in the Alzheimer's
Disease Research Center at the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles. SUBJECTS--One hundred forty-two subjects who met strict criteria
for probable AD and 121 nondemented elderly subjects were included in the
study. All subjects underwent periodic neuropsychological testing. We
extracted MMSE scores and demographic data to test the hypothesis that
women would perform more poorly than men on the MMSE. CRITERION
MEASURE--The MMSE was chosen because of its wide use in clinical and
research settings to screen for the presence or severity of dementia.
RESULTS--After controlling for the demographic variables for subjects with
AD, we observed a significant difference in the predicted direction for
total MMSE score, but there was no significant gender effect on the MMSE
for the nondemented elderly sample. Among subjects with AD,
gender-associated differences were limited to only a subset of MMSE items.
CONCLUSIONS--Results imply that MMSE performance may differ between men and
women with AD and that differences might pertain only to discrete areas of
cognitive functioning. Although gender effects were relatively small,
findings indicate the relevance of gender to studies of AD.
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Lerner
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