The role of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in individual differences in long-term memory capacity

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Montag, Christian; Felten, Andrea; Markett, Sebastian; Fischer, Luise; Winkel, Katja; Cooper, Andrew and Reuter, Martin. 2014. The role of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in individual differences in long-term memory capacity. Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, 54(4), pp. 796-802. ISSN 0895-8696 [Article]

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Official URL: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12031-01...

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The protein brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays an important role in diverse memory processes and is strongly expressed in the hippocampus. The hippocampus itself is a key structure involved in the processing of information from short-term to long-term memory. Due to the putative role of BDNF in memory consolidation, a prominent single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) on the BDNF gene (BDNF Val66Met) was investigated in the context of long-term memory performance. N = 138 students were presented with 40 words from 10 categories, each consisting of eight words such as ‘fruits’ or ‘vehicles’ in a memory recognition task (specifically the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm). Recognition performance was analyzed 25 min after the initial presentation of the word list and subsequently 1 week after the initial presentation. Overall, individual long-term memory performance immediately after learning the word list (T1) and performance 1 week later (T2) did not differ on the basis of the BDNF SNP, but an interaction effect of BDNF Val66Met by time-of-recall was found: Carriers of the Met66+ variant showed the strongest decline in hit rate performance over time.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s12031-014-0417-1