ArticleCognitive neuroscience
Development of sex differences in the human brain.
Article in Cognitive neuroscience. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Individual differences reveal distinct age and pubertal contributions to the refinement of the functional cortical hierarchy during adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Sex-specific changes in the hippocampal proteome of Negr1Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- The progression of sex differences in brain networks across the lifespan.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Longitudinal development of sex differences in the limbic system is associated with age, puberty and mental health.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Sulcal pits as potential markers of early sex-related human brain differences in healthy adults.Biology of sex differences · 2025Article
- White Matter Correlates of Psychopathic Traits in a Japanese Community Sample: Sex Matters!The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Sex Differences in the Striatal Contributions to Longitudinal Fine Motor Development in Autistic Children.Biological psychiatry · 2025Article
- Association Between 24-h Movement Behavior, Physical Fitness, and Inhibitory Control in School Adolescents: A Complex Network Analysis.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Article
- Single-Cell Analysis of Sex and Gender Differences in the Human Brain During Development and Disease.Cellular and molecular neurobiology · 2025Article
- More similarity than difference: Comparison of within- and between-sex variance in early adolescent brain structure.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Enduring prenatal androgen effects on the female brain.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Article
- No sex difference in maturation of brain morphology during the perinatal period.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- More similarity than difference: comparison of within- and between-sex variance in early adolescent brain structure.Research square · 2024Article
- Effects of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and Biological Sex on Brain Size.Anatomia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- White matter variations in congenital adrenal hyperplasia: possible implications for glucocorticoid treatment.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Resting-state fMRI activation is associated with parent-reported phenotypic features of autism in early adolescence.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2024Article
- (Re)Conceptualizing Sex and Gender in Physical Education through Social Role Theory.Quest (Grand Rapids, Mich.) · 2024Article
- Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor gene is associated with child-parent neural synchrony during competition.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sex differences in brain anatomy have been described from early childhood through late adulthood, but without any clear consensus among studies. Here, we applied a machine learning approach to estimate 'Brain Sex' using a continuous (rather than binary) classifier in 162 boys and 185 girls aged between 5 and 18 years. Changes in the estimated sex differences over time at different age groups were subsequently calculated using a sliding window approach. We hypothesized that males and females would differ in brain structure already during childhood, but that these differences will become even more pronounced with increasing age, particularly during adolescence. Overall, the classifier achieved a good performance, with an accuracy of 80.4% and an AUC of 0.897 across all age groups. Assessing changes in the estimated sex with age revealed a growing difference between the sexes with increasing age. That is, the very large effect size of d = 1.2 which was already evident during childhood increased even further from age 11 onward, and eventually reached an effect size of d = 1.6 at age 17. Altogether these findings suggest a systematic sex difference in brain structure already during childhood, and a subsequent increase of this difference during adolescence.
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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.