ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2019
Sex differences in functional connectivity during fetal brain development.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 127 citations in OpenAlex.
- Physiological influences on neurovascular coupling: A systematic review of multimodal imaging approaches and recommendations for future study designs.Experimental physiology · 2025Pooled it
- Brain responses to repetition-based rule-learning do not exhibit sex differences: an aggregated analysis of infant fNIRS studies.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- Associations between chronic placental inflammation, fetal brain development and later autism traits.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Prenatal neural network organization and later executive function development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Prenatal cell-free DNA methylome detects association with autism and maternal obesity.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Modeling medulloblastoma pathogenesis and treatment in human cerebellar organoids.Genes & development · 2026Article
- MRI-based structural development of the human newborn hypothalamus.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional Connectivity of the Neonatal Cerebellum is Impacted by Sex and Polygenic Liability for Autism.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Prenatal stress, hormones, and fetal brain development: gender differences.Hormones (Athens, Greece) · 2026Review
- Prenatal exposure to extreme heat and autism in children.The Science of the total environment · 2026Article
- Fetal functional connectivity prospectively associates with autistic traits in toddlerhood.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Article
- Sex-specific associations between hypertensive disorders in pregnancy and fetal and placental weight.Pediatric investigation · 2025Article
- Sex-Specific Effects of Early-Life Unpredictability on Hippocampal and Amygdala Responses to Novelty in Adolescents.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Assessment of resting state structural-functional relationships in perisylvian region during the early weeks after birth.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Sex differences in brain-behavior relationships in the first 2 years of life.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Whole Brain MRI Assessment of Age and Sex-Related R2* Changes in the Human Fetal Brain.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Beyond no harm: Advancing research on artificial intelligence for sexual and reproductive health and rights.npj women's health · 2025Article
- A Subset of Cortical Areas Exhibit Adult-like Functional Network Patterns in Early Childhood.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Functional connectivity of the pediatric brain.Neuroradiology · 2024Review
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Sex-related differences in brain and behavior are apparent across the life course, but the exact set of processes that guide their emergence in utero remains a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. Here, we evaluate sex and gestational age (GA)-related change in functional connectivity (FC) within and between brain wide networks. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging we examined FC in 118 human fetuses between 25.9 and 39.6 weeks GA (70 male; 48 female). Infomap was applied to the functional connectome to identify discrete prenatal brain networks in utero. A consensus procedure produced an optimal model comprised of 16 distinct fetal neural networks distributed throughout the cortex and subcortical regions. We used enrichment analysis to assess network-level clustering of strong FC-GA correlations separately in each sex group, and to identify network pairs exhibiting distinct patterns of GA-related change in FC between males and females. We discovered both within and between network FC-GA associations that varied with sex. Specifically, associations between GA and posterior cingulate-temporal pole and fronto-cerebellar FC were observed in females only, whereas the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males. These observations confirm that sexual dimorphism in functional brain systems emerges during human gestation.
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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.