Posts tagged sex differences
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Male and female brains aren’t equal when it comes to fat
Researchers have found that male and female brains respond in remarkably different ways to high-fat meals. Those differences in the brain lead to greater inflammation and increased health risks in males that indulge on fatty foods in comparison to females, a new study in mice shows. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports on October 16th may help to explain observed differences in obesity outcomes between women and men – premenopausal women carrying extra weight fare better than men do – and suggest that dietary advice should be made more sex-specific.
"Our findings, for the first time, suggest that males and females respond to high-fat diets differently," said Deborah Clegg of the Cedar-Sinai Diabetes And Obesity Research Institute in Los Angeles. "The data would suggest that is probably ‘ok’ for females to occasionally have a high-fat meal, where it is not recommended for males.
"The way we treat patients and provide dietary and nutritional advice should be altered. We might be less concerned about an occasional hamburger for women, but for men, we might more strongly encourage avoidance, especially if they have pre-existing diseases such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes."
Earlier data from Clegg’s team and others had suggested that inflammation in the brain is tied to overeating, blood sugar imbalances, and increased inflammation in other parts of the body, including fat tissue. Those effects can be triggered, in males in particular, by short-term exposure to a high-fat diet.
The researchers say they were initially shocked to discover that male and female brains differ in their fatty acid composition. When they manipulated male mouse brains to have the fatty acid profile of females, they found that those animals were protected from the ill effects of a diet high in fat.
When males with average male brains entered an inflammatory state after eating diets high in fat, they also suffered from reduced cardiac function in a way that female animals in the study did not. Those sex differences in the brain’s response to fat are related to differences between females and males in estrogen and estrogen receptor status.
Clegg says her team is now working out a strategy to confirm whether the findings in mice apply to people too. If they do, there will be some very immediate practical implications for what men and women should put on their plates.
"We have always had ‘one size fits all’ with respect to our nutritional information and our pharmaceutical approach," Clegg said. "Our data begin to suggest that sex should be factored in, and men should be more closely monitored for fat intake and inflammation than women."
(Image: Shutterstock)
Study reveals one reason brain tumors are more common in men
New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis helps explain why brain tumors occur more often in males and frequently are more harmful than similar tumors in females. For example, glioblastomas, the most common malignant brain tumors, are diagnosed twice as often in males, who suffer greater cognitive impairments than females and do not survive as long.
The researchers found that retinoblastoma protein (RB), a protein known to reduce cancer risk, is significantly less active in male brain cells than in female brain cells.
The study appears Aug. 1 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
“This is the first time anyone ever has identified a sex-linked difference that affects tumor risk and is intrinsic to cells, and that’s very exciting,” said senior author Joshua Rubin, MD, PhD. “These results suggest we need to go back and look at multiple pathways linked to cancer, checking for sex differences. Sex-based distinctions at the level of the cell may not only influence cancer risk but also the effectiveness of treatments.”
Rubin noted that RB is the target of drugs now being evaluated in clinical trials. Trial organizers hope the drugs trigger the protein’s anti-tumor effects and help cancer patients survive longer.
“In clinical trials, we typically examine data from male and female patients together, and that could be masking positive or negative responses that are limited to one sex,” said Rubin, who is an associate professor of pediatrics, neurology and anatomy and neurobiology. “At the very least, we should think about analyzing data for males and females separately in clinical trials.”
Scientists have identified many sex-linked diseases that either occur at different rates in males and females or cause different symptoms based on sex. These distinctions often are linked to sex hormones, which create and maintain many but not all of the biological differences between the sexes.
However, Rubin and his colleagues knew that sex hormones could not account for the differences in brain tumor risk.
“Male brain tumor risk remains higher throughout life despite major age-linked shifts in sex hormone production in males and females,” he said. “If the sex hormones were causing this effect, we’d see major changes in the relative rates of brain tumors in males and females at puberty. But they don’t happen then or later in life when menopause changes female sex hormone production.”
Rubin used a cell model of glioblastoma to prove it is easier to make male brain cells become tumors. After a series of genetic alterations and exposure to a growth factor, male brain cells became cancerous faster and more often than female brain cells.
In experiments designed to identify the reasons for the differences in the male and female cells, the team evaluated three genes to see if they were naturally less active in male brain cells. The genes they studied — neurofibromin, p53 and RB — normally suppress cell division and cell survival. They are mutated and disabled in many cancers.
The scientists found RB was more likely to be inactivated in male brain cells than in female brain cells. When they disabled the RB protein in female brain cells, the cells were equally susceptible to becoming cancers.
“There are other types of tumors that occur at different rates based on sex, such as some liver cancers, which occur more often in males,” Rubin said. “Knowing more about why cancer rates differ between males and females will help us understand basic mechanisms in cancer, seek more effective therapies and perform more informative clinical trials.”
(Source: news.wustl.edu)
Forty per cent of female prisoners enter correctional system with a traumatic brain injury
A study published today found that almost 40 per cent of Ontario female prisoners have a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Unlike the men participating in the study, half of these women sustained a TBI before committing their first crime.
The study, led by Dr. Angela Colantonio, senior scientist, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, was based on a survey of men and women in Ontario correctional facilities. Published in the Journal of Correctional Health Care, it is the first Canadian study of its kind.
Typically caused by a blow to the head, TBI is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. It kills 11,000 Canadians every year. TBI is commonly caused by falls, motor vehicle collisions,physical assault or sports injuries.
"We observed a striking gender difference. Female inmates with a TBI, compared to males, were much more likely to have suffered physical or sexual abuse as children," said Colantonio, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Research Chair in Gender, Work, and Health, University of Toronto. "Our research suggests the need to screen offenders and others with a history of abuse for TBI."
Dr. Colantonio highlights the need to identify inmates or others at risk of incarceration with a history of a TBI so they can receive appropriate support and treatment. This will allow the system to help prevent future offences by better assisting with the transition back into society. For example, helping individuals secure and maintain employment.
"Right now, we don’t know very much about how brain injuries affect women in the correctional system," said Colantonio. "This study indicates a need for more research, and for programs that address TBI and mental health problems among people at risk of incarceration."
Such programs should include training for correctional staff to help them recognize TBI symptoms in inmates, such as slowness to act or a failure to respond to directions. This behaviour may be misinterpreted as defiance, resulting in punishment instead of treatment.
A report last year from the Office of the Correctional Investigator showed the number of women in Canadian prisons had increased 40 per cent since 2008. The same report also found that 85 per cent of incarcerated women said they had a history of physical abuse.
"Now that we have identified this as an issue, we need to work with community organizations and correctional systems to prevent inappropriate incarceration of females with traumatic brain injury and to provide treatment so they have a better chance when they return to society," said Dr. Geoff Fernie, institute director, research, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.
The secrets of children’s chatter: research shows boys and girls learn language differently
Experts believe language uses both a mental dictionary and a mental grammar. The mental ‘dictionary’ stores sounds, words and common phrases, while mental ‘grammar’ involves the real-time composition of longer words and sentences. For example, making a longer word ‘walked’ from a smaller one ‘walk’.
However, most research into understanding how these processes work has been carried out with adults.
“Most researchers agree that the way we use language in our minds involves both storing and real-time composition,” said lead researcher Dr Cristina Dye, a specialist in child language development at Newcastle University. “But a lot of the specifics about how this happens are unclear, such as identifying exactly which parts of language are stored and which are composed.
“Most research on this topic has concentrated on adults and we wanted to see if studying children could help us learn more about these processes.”
A test based around 29 irregular verbs and 29 regular verbs was presented to the young participants. Only verbs which would be known by eight-year-olds were used.
They were presented with two sentences. One featured the verb in the context of the sentence, with the second sentence containing a blank to allow the children to produce the past-tense form. For example: Every day I walk to school. Just like every day, yesterday I ____ to school.
The children were asked to produce the missing word as quickly and as accurately as possible and their response times were recorded. The results were then analysed to discover which words were stored or created in real-time.
Results showed girls were more likely to memorise words and phrases – use their mental dictionary - while boys used mental grammar - i.e assembled these from smaller parts - more often.
The findings could have implications in the way youngsters are taught in the classroom, believes Dr Dye, who is based in the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences.
She said: “What we found as we carried out the study was that girls were far more likely to remember forms like ‘walked’ while boys relied much more on their mental grammar to compose ‘walked’ from ‘walk’ and ‘ed’. This fits in with previous research which has identified differences between the sexes when it comes to memorising facts and events, where girls also seem to have an advantage compared to boys.
“One interesting aside to this is that as girls often outperform boys at school, it could be that the curriculum is put together in a way which benefits the way girls learn. It may be worth further investigation to see if this is the case and if so, is there a way lessons could be changed so boys can get the most out of them too.”
Paper: Children’s Computation of Complex Linguistic Forms: A study of Frequency and Imageability Effects
(Image: Getty Images)
Caffeine affects boys and girls differently after puberty
Caffeine intake by children and adolescents has been rising for decades, due in large part to the popularity of caffeinated sodas and energy drinks, which now are marketed to children as young as four. Despite this, there is little research on the effects of caffeine on young people.
One researcher who is conducting such investigations is Jennifer Temple, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions.
Her new study finds that after puberty, boys and girls experience different heart rate and blood pressure changes after consuming caffeine. Girls also experience some differences in caffeine effect during their menstrual cycles.
The study, “Cardiovascular Responses to Caffeine by Gender and Pubertal Stage,” will be published online June 16 in the July 2014 edition of the journal Pediatrics.
Past studies, including those by this research team, have shown that caffeine increases blood pressure and decreases heart rate in children, teens and adults, including pre-adolescent boys and girls. The purpose here was to learn whether gender differences in cardiovascular responses to caffeine emerge after puberty and if those responses differ across phases of the menstrual cycle.
Temple says, “We found an interaction between gender and caffeine dose, with boys having a greater response to caffeine than girls, as well as interactions between pubertal phase, gender and caffeine dose, with gender differences present in post-pubertal, but not in pre-pubertal, participants.
“Finally,” she says, “we found differences in responses to caffeine across the menstrual cycle in post-pubertal girls, with decreases in heart rate that were greater in the mid-luteal phase and blood pressure increases that were greater in the mid-follicular phase of the menstrual cycle.
“In this study, we were looking exclusively into the physical results of caffeine ingestion,” she says.
Phases of the menstrual cycle, marked by changing levels of hormones, are the follicular phase, which begins on the first day of menstruation and ends with ovulation, and the luteal phase, which follows ovulation and is marked by significantly higher levels of progesterone than the previous phase.
Future research in this area will determine the extent to which gender differences are mediated by physiological factors such as steroid hormone level or by differences in patterns of caffeine use, caffeine use by peers or more autonomy and control over beverage purchases, Temple says.
This double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-response study was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
It examined heart rate and blood pressure before and after administration of placebo and two doses of caffeine (1 and 2 mg/kg) in pre-pubertal (8- to 9-year-old; n = 52) and post-pubertal (15- to 17-year-old; n = 49) boys (n = 54) and girls (n = 47).
Study helps explain why MS is more common in women
A newly identified difference between the brains of women and men with multiple sclerosis (MS) may help explain why so many more women than men get the disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report.
In recent years, the diagnosis of MS has increased more rapidly among women, who get the disorder nearly four times more than men. The reasons are unclear, but the new study is the first to associate a sex difference in the brain with MS.
(Image caption: An image of tissue from a female brain (left) affected by multiple sclerosis (MS) shows that the brain has much higher levels of a blood vessel receptor (shown in red) than a male brain affected by MS (right). The difference could help explain why so many more women get MS. Credit: Robyn Klein)
The findings appear May 8 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Studying mice and people, the researchers found that females susceptible to MS produce higher levels of a blood vessel receptor protein, S1PR2, than males and that the protein is present at even higher levels in the brain areas that MS typically damages.
“It was a ‘Bingo!’ moment – our genetic studies led us right to this receptor,” said senior author Robyn Klein, MD, PhD. “When we looked at its function in mice, we found that it can determine whether immune cells cross blood vessels into the brain. These cells cause the inflammation that leads to MS.”
An investigational MS drug currently in clinical trials blocks other receptors in the same protein family but does not affect S1PR2. Klein recommended that researchers work to develop a drug that disables S1PR2.
MS is highly unpredictable, flaring and fading at irregular intervals and producing a hodgepodge of symptoms that includes problems with mobility, vision, strength and balance. More than 2 million people worldwide have the condition.
In MS, inflammation caused by misdirected immune cells damages a protective coating that surrounds the branches of nerve cells in the brain and spinal column. This leads the branches to malfunction and sometimes causes them to wither away, disrupting nerve cell communication necessary for normal brain functions such as movement and coordination.
For the new research, Klein studied a mouse model of MS in which the females get the disease more often than the males. The scientists compared levels of gene activity in male and female brains. They also looked at gene activity in the regions of the female brain that MS damages and in other regions the disorder typically does not harm.
They identified 20 genes that were active at different levels in vulnerable female brain regions. Scientists don’t know what 16 of these genes do. Among the remaining genes, the increased activity of S1PR2 stood out because researchers knew from previous studies that the protein regulates how easy it is for cells and molecules to pass through the walls of blood vessels.
Additional experiments showed that S1PR2 opens up the blood-brain barrier, a structure in the brain’s blood vessels that tightly regulates the materials that cross into the brain and spinal fluid. This barrier normally blocks potentially harmful substances from entering the brain. Opening it up likely allows the inflammatory cells that cause MS to get into the central nervous system.
When the researchers tested brain tissue samples obtained from 20 patients after death, they found more S1PR2 in MS patients’ brains than in people without the disorder. Brain tissue from females also had higher levels of S1PR2 than male brain tissue. The highest levels of S1PR2 were found in the brains of two female patients whose symptoms flared and faded irregularly, a pattern scientists call relapsing and remitting MS.
Klein is collaborating with chemists to design a tracer that will allow scientists to monitor S1PR2 levels in the brains of people while they are living. She hopes this will lead to a fuller understanding of how S1PR2 contributes to MS.
“This is an exciting first step in resolving the mystery of why MS rates are dramatically higher in women and in finding better ways to reduce the incidence of this disorder and control symptoms,” said Klein, associate professor of medicine. Klein also is an associate professor of pathology and immunology and of neurobiology and anatomy.
(Source: news.wustl.edu)
Pain curbs sex drive in female mice, but not in males
“Not tonight, dear, I have a headache.” Generally speaking, that line is attributed to the wife in a couple, implying that women’s sexual desire is more affected by pain than men’s.
Now, researchers from McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal have investigated, possibly for the first time in any species, the direct impact of pain on sexual behaviour in mice. Their study, published in the April 23 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, found that pain from inflammation greatly reduced sexual motivation in female mice in heat — but had no such effect on male mice.
“We know from other studies that women’s sexual desire is far more dependent on context than men’s – but whether this is due to biological or social/cultural factors, such as upbringing and media influence, isn’t known,” says Jeffrey Mogil, a psychology professor at McGill and corresponding author of the new study. “Our finding that female mice, too, show pain-inhibited sexual desire suggests there may be an evolutionary biology explanation for these effects in humans – and not simply a sociocultural one.”
To conduct the study, the researchers placed mice in a mating chamber divided by a barrier with openings too small for male mice to squeeze through. This enabled the females to decide whether, and for how long, to spend time with a male partner. Female mice in pain spent less time on the “male side” of the testing chamber, and as a result less sexual behaviour occurred. The researchers found that the sexual motivation of the female mice could be revived, however with a pain-relieving drug (pregabalin) or with either of two known desire-enhancing drugs.
Male mice, for their part, were tested in an undivided chamber in which they had free access to a female partner in heat. Their sexual behaviour was entirely unaffected by the same inflammatory pain. There were no differences in pain perception between the sexes, the researchers determined.
“Chronic pain is very often accompanied by sexual problems in humans,” says Prof. Yitzchak Binik, a professor of psychology at McGill and Director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service at the McGill University Health Center. “This research provides an animal model of pain-inhibited sexual desire that will help scientists study this important symptom of chronic pain.”
Melissa Farmer, now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, led the study as a doctoral student at McGill under the supervision of Prof. Mogil, a pain researcher, and Prof. Binik, a human sexual-disorder researcher.
Prof. James Pfaus of Concordia University’s Centre for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, an expert on rodent sexual behaviour, also co-authored the study. “The sex differences in pain reactivity open new doors to understanding how sexual responses are organized in the brain,” Prof. Pfaus said. “In fact, the growing trend towards personalized medicine requires us to understand how particular ailments, along with their treatments, might impact the sexual lives of women and men.“
Brain connections may explain why girls mature faster
Newcastle University scientists have discovered that as the brain re-organises connections throughout our life, the process begins earlier in girls which may explain why they mature faster during the teenage years.
As we grow older, our brains undergo a major reorganisation reducing the connections in the brain. Studying people up to the age of 40, scientists led by Dr Marcus Kaiser and Ms Sol Lim at Newcastle University found that while overall connections in the brain get streamlined, long-distance connections that are crucial for integrating information are preserved.
The researchers suspect this newly-discovered selective process might explain why brain function does not deteriorate – and indeed improves –during this pruning of the network. Interestingly, they also found that these changes occurred earlier in females than in males.
Explaining the work which is being published in Cerebral Cortex, Dr Kaiser, Reader in Neuroinformatics at Newcastle University, says: “Long-distance connections are difficult to establish and maintain but are crucial for fast and efficient processing. If you think about a social network, nearby friends might give you very similar information – you might hear the same news from different people. People from different cities or countries are more likely to give you novel information. In the same way, some information flow within a brain module might be redundant whereas information from other modules, say integrating the optical information about a face with the acoustic information of a voice is vital in making sense of the outside world.”
Brain “pruned”
The researchers at Newcastle, Glasgow and Seoul Universities evaluated the scans of 121 healthy participants between the ages of 4 and 40 years as this is where the major connectivity changes can be seen during this period of maturation and improvement in the brain. The work is part of the EPSRC-funded Human Green Brain project which examines human brain development.
Using a non-invasive technique called diffusion tensor imaging – a special measurement protocol for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners – they demonstrated that fibres are overall getting pruned that period.
However, they found that not all projections (long-range connections) between brain regions are affected to the same extent; changes were influenced differently depending on the types of connections.
Projections that are preserved were short-cuts that quickly link different processing modules, e.g. for vision and sound, and allow fast information transfer and synchronous processing. Changes in these connections have been found in many developmental brain disorders including autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia.
The researchers have demonstrated for the first time that the loss of white matter fibres between brain regions is a highly selective process – a phenomenon they call preferential detachment. They show that connections between distant brain regions, between brain hemispheres, and between processing modules lose fewer nerve fibres during brain maturation than expected. The researchers say this may explain how we retain a stable brain network during brain maturation.
Commenting on the fact that these changes occurred earlier in females than males, Ms Sol Lim explains: “The loss of connectivity during brain development can actually help to improve brain function by reorganizing the network more efficiently. Say instead of talking to many people at random, asking a couple of people who have lived in the area for a long time is the most efficient way to know your way. In a similar way, reducing some projections in the brain helps to focus on essential information.”
(Source: ncl.ac.uk)
Establishing the basis of humour
The act of laughing at a joke is the result of a two-stage process in the brain, first detecting an incongruity before then resolving it with an expression of mirth. The brain actions involved in understanding humour differ between young boys and girls. These are the conclusions reached by a US-based scientist supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Since science has demonstrated that animals are also capable of planning into the future, the once deep cleft between the brain capacities of humans and animals is rapidly disappearing. Fortunately, we can still claim humour as our unique selling point. This makes it even more astonishing that researchers have considered this attribute but fleetingly (and have spent much more time on negative emotions such as fear), write the Swiss neuroscientist Pascal Vrticka and his US colleagues at Stanford University, in the journal “Nature Reviews Neuroscience”.
Strangely cheerful feelings
In their recently published article (*), the researchers demonstrate that, while laughter at a joke requires activity in many different areas of the brain, just two separate elements can be identified among the complex patterns of activity. In the first part, the brain detects a logical incongruity, which, in the second part, it proceeds to resolve. The ensuing feeling of cheerfulness arises from a brain activity that can be clearly differentiated from that of other positive emotions.
Moreover, in the study of 22 children aged between six and thirteen, the research team led by Vrticka showed that sex-specific differences in the processing of humour are formed early on in life. The researchers recorded the children’s brain activity while they were enjoying film clips that were either funny – slapstick home video – or entertaining – such as clips of children break-dancing. On average, the girls’ brains responded more to the funny scenes, while the boys showed greater reaction to the entertaining clips.
Benefits of improved understanding
Vrticka speculates that these sex-based differences could play a role in helping women to select a suitable (and humorous) mate. Aside from this, humour also plays a key role in psychological health. This is demonstrated, among other things, in the fact that adults with psychological disorders such as autism or depression often have a modified humour processing activity and respond less markedly to humour than people who do not have these disorders. Vrticka believes that an improved understanding of the processes that take place in our brain when we enjoy the effects of an amusing joke could be of great benefit in the development of treatments.
(Source: alphagalileo.org)
Brain Connectivity Study Reveals Striking Differences Between Men and Women
A new brain connectivity study from Penn Medicine published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women that’s lending credence to some commonly-held beliefs about their behavior.
In one of the largest studies looking at the “connectomes” of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
“These maps show us a stark difference—and complementarity—in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.
For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.
Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population.
In the study, Verma and colleagues, including co-authors Ruben C. Gur, PhD, a professor of psychology in the department of Psychiatry, and Raquel E. Gur, MD, PhD, professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Radiology, investigated the gender-specific differences in brain connectivity during the course of development in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). DTI is water-based imaging technique that can trace and highlight the fiber pathways connecting the different regions of the brain, laying the foundation for a structural connectome or network of the whole brain.
This sample of youths was studied as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, a National Institute of Mental Health-funded collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania Brain Behavior Laboratory and the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The brain is a roadmap of neural pathways linking many networks that help us process information and react accordingly, with behavior controlled by several of these sub-networks working in conjunction.
In the study, the researchers found that females displayed greater connectivity in the supratentorial region, which contains the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres. Males, on the other hand, displayed greater connectivity within each hemisphere.
By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control, where males displayed greater inter-hemispheric connectivity and females displayed greater intra-hemispheric connectivity.
These connections likely give men an efficient system for coordinated action, where the cerebellum and cortex participate in bridging between perceptual experiences in the back of the brain, and action, in the front of the brain, according to the authors. The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side.
The authors observed only a few gender differences in the connectivity in children younger than 13 years, but the differences were more pronounced in adolescents aged 14 to 17 years and young adults older than 17.
The findings were also consistent with a Penn behavior study, of which this imaging study was a subset of, that demonstrated pronounced sexual differences. Females outperformed males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests. Males performed better on spatial processing and sensorimotor speed. Those differences were most pronounced in the 12 to 14 age range.
“It’s quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are,” said Dr. Ruben Gur. “Detailed connectome maps of the brain will not only help us better understand the differences between how men and women think, but it will also give us more insight into the roots of neurological disorders, which are often sex related.”
Next steps are to quantify how an individual’s neural connections are different from the population; identify which neural connections are gender specific and common in both; and to see if findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies fall in line with the connectome data.