ArticleHuman brain mapping2023
Both brain size and biological sex contribute to variation in white matter microstructure in middle-aged healthy adults.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Growth of White Matter Signal Aberrations and Cortical Changes in Men and Women: A 9-Year Multiple-Time-Point Longitudinal MRI Study in Older Adults.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Association between vascular risk factors and white matter integrity among diverse predominantly older Hispanic/Latino adults from the SOL-INCA MRI study.GeroScience · 2026Article
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- Sex-specific immune-brain coupling in hippocampal circuits and Alzheimer's disease vulnerability.Research square · 2026Article
- White matter microstructure differences between 15q11.2 copy number variation carriers and non-carriers in mid-to-late life.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Sex-specific hippocampal microstructural alterations in 11-12-year-old adolescents with a history of mild traumatic brain injury.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- White matter microstructural and macrostructural profiles during midlife reveal sex differences between men and women at different menopausal stages.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Microstructural organization of superior longitudinal fasciculus and cingulum bundle support metacognition driven cognitive offloading.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Lifespan reference curves for harmonizing multi-site regional brain white matter metrics from diffusion MRI.Scientific data · 2025Article
- "Precision Medicine" and the Failed Search for Binary Brain Sex Differences to Address Gender Behavioral Health Disparities.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Review
- Asymmetry of the Frontal Aslant Tract Depends on Handedness.AJNR. American journal of neuroradiology · 2024Article
- Review
- Distinct Longitudinal Brain White Matter Microstructure Changes and Associated Polygenic Risk of Common Psychiatric Disorders and Alzheimer's Disease in the UK Biobank.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- Sex, gender diversity, and brain structure in early adolescence.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Modeling the neurocognitive dynamics of language across the lifespan.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
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- Current Auditory Hallucinations Are Not Associated With Specific White Matter Diffusion Alterations in Schizophrenia.Schizophrenia bulletin open · 2024Article
- Brain-wide associations between white matter and age highlight the role of fornix microstructure in brain ageing.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Both brain size and biological sex contribute to variation in white matter microstructure in middle-aged healthy adults.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Bio-psycho-social factors' associations with brain age: a large-scale UK Biobank diffusion study of 35,749 participants.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Whether head size and/or biological sex influence proxies of white matter (WM) microstructure such as fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) remains controversial. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) indices are also associated with age, but there are large discrepancies in the spatial distribution and timeline of age-related differences reported. The aim of this study was to evaluate the associations between intracranial volume (ICV), sex, and age and DTI indices from WM in a population-based study of healthy individuals (n = 812) aged 50-66 in the Nord-Trøndelag health survey. Semiautomated tractography and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) analyses were performed on the entire sample and in an ICV-matched sample of men and women. The tractography results showed a similar positive association between ICV and FA in all major WM tracts in men and women. Associations between ICV and MD, radial diffusivity and axial diffusivity were also found, but to a lesser extent than FA. The TBSS results showed that both men and women had areas of higher and lower FA when controlling for age, but after controlling for age and ICV only women had areas with higher FA. The ICV matched analysis also demonstrated that only women had areas of higher FA. Age was negatively associated with FA across the entire WM skeleton in the TBSS analysis, independent of both sex and ICV. Combined, these findings demonstrated that both ICV and sex contributed to variation in DTI indices and emphasized the importance of considering ICV as a covariate in DTI analysis.
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