WASHINGTON — Who has a better memory: men or women? It can be the subject of some good-natured arguments within couples, but it can get to be a serious matter as people age. A new study suggests an answer.
Jill Goldstein, director of research at the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is the lead author of a new study on the subject, and she tells CBS News that she’s found “women in general have better verbal memory function than men” across various metrics.
That difference, however, narrows a bit after women go through menopause, and blood tests found a link between declining memory and a loss of the hormone estradiol.
The study was published Wednesday in the journal Menopause, and tested 212 men and women between the ages of 45 and 55 memorization, semantic processing (naming as many related words as possible on various subjects) and associative member (matching names to faces and occupations).
It’s too soon to make any definitive associations, said Dr. JoAnn V. Pinkerton, the executive director of the North American Menopause Society, told CBS News, but this isn’t the first study to find that women had better memory or to link estradiol to memory in women.
The World Health Organization says that more than 46 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, and they think that’ll rise to more than 130 million by 2050.
“If we don’t figure out how to treat [Alzheimer’s],” Goldstein said, dealing with it after the fact “is going to tank our children’s economy.”
She added that she thinks “understanding sex differences will provide clues” to the disease.
