Sex-Differences in the Early Detection of Dementia Risk Using a Cognitive-motor Integration Task

Abstract

Cognitive-motor integration (CMI) involves concurrent thought and action which requires the interaction of large brain networks. Our research objectives were to examine the effect that dementia risk has on the ability to integrate rules into action and to investigate sex-related differences in this rule-based motor performance. Given that early-stage dementia involves neural network dysfunction, problems with CMI may prove useful for early dementia detection. Males and females at high- and low-dementia risk were tested on increasingly spatially-dissociated visuomotor tasks. We observed significantly greater endpoint error scores and corrective path lengths in females compared to males in the most complex CMI condition. These data suggest that underlying brain networks controlling simultaneous thought and action differ between the sexes, and that dementia risk may affect female CMI performance to a greater extent. Thus, sex-related differences must be taken into account when assessing CMI performance as a means to examine dementia risk-related functional abilities