Gender and Hormone Levels Influence Cortical Activation during Synonym Generation. An fMRI Study across Menstrual Cycle and Sex at 3 T

H. Kugel, C. Konrad, S. Schoening, S. Schaefer, P. Beizai, E. Pletziger, P. Ohrmann, A. Kersting, W. Heindel, V. Arolt, A. Engelien Dept. of Clinical Radiology, University of Muenster, Muenster, NRW, Germany, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of Muenster, Muenster, NRW, Germany, Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research (IZKF), University of Muenster, Muenster, NRW, Germany Introduction As known from data from animal experiments, steroid hormones have an effect on brain function (1). Newer investigations with humans have shown that the level of sexual hormones and the menstrual cycle might be important factors for the activation of cortical networks (2,3). The aim of this study is to examine systematically possible gender differences and menstrual cycle effects using a difficult synonym generation task, during which behavioral gender differences had recently been reported (4). There are just a few previous studies that have addressed gender differences in verbal fluency and other language tasks (5-8), and results remain inconsistent.