Gender comparisons of cerebral glucose metabolic rate in healthy adults during a cognitive task

Forty-one healthy volunteer subjects (26 men and 15 women; ages 18–45) underwent positron emission tomography (PET) to measure global and regional cerebral glucose metabolic rate (GMR). Subjects performed a cognitive activation task, the continuous performance test of attention, during uptake of the [18F]deoxyglucose as a metabolic tracer. No gender effect was seen in regional or global GMR; relative GMR (ratio of regional GMR to whole brain GMR) showed seven regions that differed between males and females. This suggests that during an activation task some brain regions may elicit gender differences when compared to the whole brain.