DEK and Cognitive impairment: While our findings clearly demonstrate that females are particularly vulnerable to cognitive impairments in hippocampal-dependent tasks such as the Morris Water Maze, the female-biased deficits observed during the reversal phase of this task also implicate the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region critical for executive function and cognitive flexibility, particularly in reversal learning[62] This suggests that Dek loss in other brain areas beyond the hippocampus, including the mPFC, may contribute to the observed sex differences in cognitive performance.