ArticleScientific reports2024
Women and men with distressing low sexual desire exhibit sexually dimorphic brain processing.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparison of women's and men's sexual desires based on the emotional atmosphere of the family and the initial incompatible schemas with the mediating role of self-compassion.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Dissociable effects of LSD and MDMA on striato-cortical connectivity in healthy subjects.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- The Neuroendocrine Regulation of Reproductive Behavior and Emotional Control by Kisspeptin.The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism · 2025Review
- Female Syrian hamster analyses of bremelanotide, a US FDA approved drug for the treatment of female hypoactive sexual desire disorder.Neuropharmacology · 2025Article
- The Complex Role Played by the Default Mode Network during Sexual Stimulation: A Cluster-Based fMRI Meta-Analysis.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
16 authors.
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Abstract
Distressing low sexual desire, termed Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), affects approximately 10% of women and 8% of men. In women, the 'top-down' theory of HSDD describes hyperactivity in higher-level cognitive brain regions, suppressing lower-level emotional/sexual brain areas. However, it is unknown how this neurofunctional disturbance compares to HSDD in men. To investigate this, we employed task-based functional MRI in 32 women and 32 men with HSDD to measure sexual-brain processing during sexual versus non-sexual videos, as well as psychometric questionnaires to assess sexual desire/arousal. We demonstrate that women had greater activation in higher-level and lower-level brain regions, compared to men. Indeed, women who had greater hypothalamic activation in response to sexual videos, reported higher psychometric scores in the evaluative (r = 0.55, P = 0.001), motivational (r = 0.56, P = 0.003), and physiological (r = 0.57, P = 0.0006) domains of sexual desire and arousal after watching the sexual videos in the scanner. By contrast, no similar correlations were observed in men. Taken together, this is the first direct comparison of the neural correlates of distressing low sexual desire between women and men. The data supports the 'top-down' theory of HSDD in women, whereas in men HSDD appears to be associated with different neurofunctional processes.
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