title: The role of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in individual differences in long-term memory capacity.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany, christian.montag@uni-bonn-diff.de.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Montag
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Felten
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Markett
authors.forename: Luise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Fischer
authors.forename: Katja
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Winkel
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cooper
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Reuter
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D019208:Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor / Q000235:genetics*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D057567:Memory, Long-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D014706:Verbal Learning
chemical_list: D019208:Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor