Sex Differences in PFNs

Prior work suggests that individual differences in the spatial organization of functional brain networks across the cortex are associated with psychopathology and differ systematically by sex. We aimed to evaluate the impact of sex on the spatial organization of  personalized functional brain networks (PFNs), leveraging person-specific atlases of functional brain networks in a sample of 6437 youths from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.  Sex differences in PFN topography were greatest in association networks including the frontoparietal, ventral attention and default mode networks.  Machine learning  models trained on participants’ PFNs  were able to classify participant sex with high accuracy. These results suggest a potential contributor to the female-biased  risk in depressive and anxiety disorders that emerge at the transition from childhood to adolescence. 

Applying precision functional mapping to study the maternal brain may also both enable the development of quantitative neurobiological markers of risk for perinatal and optimize personalized neuromodulation. Precision brain mapping may help

us understand how hormonally sensitive association networks reorganize during the perinatal period and give rise to meaningful differences in one’s mental health.