Early androgen exposure modulates spatial cognition in congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)
Section snippets
Subjects
The CAH patients consisted of three groups: 25 (14 males and 11 females) patients with the salt wasting (SW) form, 13 (7 males and 6 females) patients with the simple virilizing (SV) form, and 16 patients (5 males and 11 females) with the non-classic form. Patients were classified according to clinical and endocrinological evaluation at presentation and all classifications were confirmed by genotype. Additionally, 55 healthy control subjects (22 females and 33 males) participated in the study.
Latency
All participants became faster at finding the platform over the course of the trials as indicated by a significant main effect of Block on latency (F(3, 300) = 2.76, p < .05). In addition, males were significantly faster in reaching the platform than females (main effect of Sex F(1, 100) = 12.23, p = .001). Most importantly, a significant Sex by Diagnosis interaction (F(3, 100) = 3.52, p < .05) indicated that the sex-related differences in latency were modulated by diagnosis. To follow up on this
Discussion
The study examined spatial cognition using an ecologically valid virtual water maze task in patients with androgen excess due to CAH. Two main findings emerged: (1) the severity of the disease and (2) the history of long-term excess androgen exposure during childhood modulated performance on a spatial task. These findings support the hypothesis of a direct impact of sex steroids on human spatial cognition.
We hypothesized that if prenatal androgen exposure was critical, females with the more
Role of the funding sources
This research was supported (in part) by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health and (in part) by the Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia Research, Education and Support (CARES) Foundation.
Conflicts of interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.