• Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Credit: Cavan Images/Getty Some sex differences in brain-connectivity patterns become more pronounced with age, according to new research. • Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain’s connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. • The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv1, and has not yet been peer reviewed. • The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders - and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers. • For example, women are about twice as likely as men todevelop anxiety or depression2, and boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed withautism spectrum disorderthan girls3. • “We are very excited about this study, which to our knowledge is the first one to compare how sex differences in brain networks evolve over the lifespan,” says Amy Kuceyeski, a computational neuroimager at Weill Cornell Medicine in Ithaca, New York.
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- Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Brain differences between sexes get more pronounced from puberty Study could help reveal why some mental health disorders vary between men and women - but it’s not clear whether the differences are due to sex or gender. Some sex differences in brain-connectivity pat
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