Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience Aging Neuroscience

Abstract

be exacerbated by T deprivation in people (Almeida et al., 2004; Sunderland et al., 2004) and male mice (Rosario et al., 2006). Together, these fi ndings suggest that androgens may play a role in age-related, hippocampally-infl uenced, cognitive behavior. Typical aging is associated with a decline in steroid hormones and cognitive and affective responses, which may be infl uenced by the hippocampus (Rosario et al., 2009). For example, compared to healthy, middle-aged counterparts, aged men and women experience impaired performance in tasks measuring visuo-spatial function (Clark et al., 2006), have increased self-reported feelings of depression (Butler, 2006), and exhibit increased incidence of anxiety disorders (Delhez et al., 2003). This decline occurs con-comitantly with a decline in endogenous steroid hormone levels, which may infl uence these processes (Janowsky et al., 2000; Beer et al., 2006; Janowsky, 2006a,b). Unlike women that experience a precipitous decline in ovarian steroids with menopause (Markou et al., 2004), men experience a more gradual, decade-by-decade decline in their primary gonadal steroids, T and its metabolites, with aging (1.0–1.2% per year; Janowsky, 2006a,b). Differences in endogenous T levels may alter cognitive and affective behav