ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2017
Incorporating Sex As a Biological Variable in Neuropsychiatric Research: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Be?
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 160 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex/gender differences in the human autistic brains: A systematic review of 20 years of neuroimaging research.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Pooled it
- Setting up a clinical trial for a novel disease: a case study of the Doxycycline for the Treatment of Nodding Syndrome Trial - challenges, enablers and lessons learned.Global health action · 2018Trial
- Cariprazine modulates affective and social behaviors through ventral striatal islands of Calleja neurons.Current zoology · 2026Article
- Gender "in the wild": toward a person-specific behavioral neuroendocrinology.Biology of sex differences · 2026Review
- Checking assumptions: advancing the analysis of sex and gender in health sciences.Biology of sex differences · 2026Review
- The Role of Prenatal Microglial Activation and Its Sex Differences in the Development of Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Neurodegenerative Diseases.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Neuropsychiatric symptoms in siblings of children with Tourette syndrome in the EMTICS study.JCPP advances · 2025Article
- Cumulative risk assessment as the pathway to public health protection for behavioral neurotoxicity.Neurotoxicology · 2025Review
- Operant social self-administration in male CD1 mice.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Longitudinal Sex-at-Birth and Age Analyses of Cortical Structure in the ABCD Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Sex-dependent biobehavioural responses to transgenerational maternal stress: evidence of stress resilience and vulnerability in the F3 generation.Environmental epigenetics · 2025Article
- Sex-specific differences in brain activity dynamics of youth with a family history of substance use disorder.Nature. Mental health · 2025Article
- Effects of Traumatic Brain Injury on the Orexin/Hypocretin System.Neurotrauma reports · 2025Review
- Sex Differences in Human Brain Structure at Birth.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Differently different?: A commentary on the emerging social cognitive neuroscience of female autism.Biology of sex differences · 2024Review
- Review
- Beyond the binary: Characterizing the relationships between sex and neuropeptide receptor binding density measures in the rat brain.Hormones and behavior · 2024Article
- Practical solutions for including sex as a biological variable (SABV) in preclinical neuropsychopharmacological research.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2024Review
- Prenatal fluoride exposure, offspring visual acuity and autonomic nervous system function in 6-month-old infants.Environment international · 2024Article
- Epigenetic mechanisms underlying sex differences in the brain and behavior.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding the multiplicity of ways in which sex can alter the brain is essential to crafting policies and treatments that are beneficial for all human beings. This is particularly true for the field of neuropsychopharmacology, as many neuropsychiatric disorders exhibit gender bias in the frequency, severity, or response to treatment. The goal of this circumspective is to provide two views on the current state of the art of the relations between sex and the brain, relations that are studied almost exclusively by comparing females and males on specific end points, from gene expression to behavior. We start by suggesting a framework for defining what is being measured and what it means. We suggest that 'sex differences' can be classified on four dimensions: (1) persistent vs transient across the lifespan; (2) context independent vs dependent; (3) dimorphic vs continuous; and (4) a direct vs an indirect consequence of sex. To accurately classify a sex difference along these dimensions, one may need to compare females and males under varied conditions. We next discuss current data on the mechanisms of sexual differentiation of the brain and on sex differences in the brain to conclude that the brain of each male and female is a mosaic of relative masculinization, feminization, and sameness, which theoretically could produce an infinite variety of individuals. We also raise the possibility that sex differences in the brain are canalized, which may act to both enhance and restrain variation between males and females. We end by discussing ways to consider sex when studying neuropsychiatric disorders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.