Gender Influence on Cognitive and Structural Differences in People with Schizophrenia

Previous literature has explored sex differences to explain differences in cognition and behavior. If there are sex differences in the brain, how would these differences alter our perception of treatment and diagnosis in a clinical population, such as people with schizophrenia? In our study, we wanted to find out whether there is an effect of sex on cortical thickness (CT) in the parietal lobule and cognitive measures of verbal memory, verbal learning, attention, spatial reasoning, and working memory in healthy controls (HC) and people with schizophrenia (SZ). We additionally explored relationships between cognition and parietal lobule CT. RESULTS: There is no effect of sex on cognition and CT in the parietal lobule, but we found differences in correlations between CT and cognition in each sex and diagnosis group. DISCUSSION: Further research is necessary to discover whether clinicians need to consider gender in the treatment of people with schizophrenia