A role of BDNF polymorphism in age-related recognition memory processes?

Episodic memory difficulties are frequently encountered in normal aging. However, the effect of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) genetic polymorphism on decreased memory performance remains largely unclear. BDNF plays a key role in neuronal growth as well as neuronal survival, and has a significant involvement in synaptic processes of memory. Consequently, we have examined the concurrent effect of BDNF genetic polymorphism on recognition performance in young and old adults carrying Val(val/val) and Met (val/met and me/met) alleles of the gene. Our participants were selected form a larger cohort, which provided with blood sample for genetic information extraction and completed a recognition memory task (old/new judgements following an encoding phase in which pictures were presented once or twice) in an fMRI setting. Our final sample consisted of 106 participants. Specifically, the groups were constituted of 56 healthy old adults (age 60-75 years, M=65.6 years) and 50 young adults (age 19-30 years, M=23.8 years), with 28 young and 32 old BDNF Val allele carriers, 22 young and 24 old Met allele carriers. Composite percentage scores were calculated by computing the percentage scores of hits, false alarms, correct rejections and omissions between the groups. Between-group and BDNF differences were assessed with two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on these measures. We observed significant group effects for the number of correct rejections (young>old) and false alarms (old>young). However, no main or interaction genetic effects were observed. These data seems suggest that BDNF polymorphism does not have a significant effect on recognition memory performance in agingInfluence of genotypic variations and cognitive reserve on the cerebral underpinnings of memory function during normal agein