%0 Journal Article
%T Cognitive Performance in Men and Women Infected with HIV-1
%A Jos¨¦ Mar¨ªa Fa¨ªlde Garrido
%A Mar¨ªa Lameiras Fern¨¢ndez
%A Marika Foltz
%A Yolanda Rodr¨ªguez Castro
%A Mar¨ªa Victoria Carrera Fern¨¢ndez
%J Psychiatry Journal
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/382126
%X Introduction. Very few studies have examined the neuropsychological performance of HIV-positive women, and even fewer have attempted a comparison of cognitive functioning by gender. The aim of this study was to describe the nature of the neuropsychological performance of HIV seropositive patients by gender. Methods. A clinical sample made up of 151 subjects was recruited to participate in this study. All of the subjects underwent the same assessment process, consisting of a neuropsychological evaluation and an interview to gather sociodemographic, toxicological, and clinical data. Results and Discussion. Despite the fact that men obtained higher scores in visual memory, attention/psychomotor speed, and abstract reasoning/verbal intelligence, these differences were not statistically significant. In contrast, significant differences were found depending on subjects¡¯ serological status. Seropositive participants¡¯ neuropsychological performance was significantly lower than that of the seronegative participants in all of the areas assessed as follows: (1) visual memory; (2) attention/psychomotor speed; (3) abstract reasoning/verbal intelligence; (4) verbal memory for texts; (5) verbal memory for digits and words. Conclusions. The results from this study reveal no significant gender differences in the cognitive performance of patients infected with HIV-1. 1. Introduction From a scientific standpoint, women have traditionally been underrepresented in biomedical and psychological research [1]. This has also been the case in studies done on the neurological consequences of HIV-1, in which the majority of research to date has been carried out with all-male samples [2, 3]. Although this tendency has begun to change in recent years, there is still only a limited number of studies which examine neuropsychological aspects of seropositive women, or which compare the cognitive functioning of seropositive patients by gender [4, 5]. As a consequence, we still know very little about the neuropsychological consequences of the HIV-1 virus for seropositive women. The scarce information which is available does not shed much light on the question; contradictory results have been found regarding the existence of differences in neuropsychological functioning between seropositive and seronegative women [6, 7]. For instance, Mason et al. [8] found differences between HIV-infected and noninfected women in the areas of psychomotor speed, verbal memory, and attention. In contrast, other researchers did not find such differences [9, 10]. Durvasula et al. [6] found differences between
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/psychiatry/2013/382126/