Dump the ?dimorphism?: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS

卷:125

Article

Eliot, Lise^1,2  Ahmed, Adnan²  Khan, Hiba²  Patel, Julie² 

[1] Rosalind Franklin Univ Med & Sci, Neurosci Discipline, Dept Foundat Sci & Humanities, 3333 Green Bay Rd, N Chicago, IL 60064 USA

[2] Rosalind Franklin Univ Med & Sci, Chicago Med Sch, 3333 Green Bay Rd, N Chicago, IL 60064 USA

关键词: Sex;    Gender;    MRI;    Meta-analysis;    Corpus callosum;    Hippocampus;    Amygdala;    Massa intermedia;    Anterior commissure;    Lateralization;    Connectome;    Default mode network;    Verbal;    Spatial;    Mental rotation;    Emotion;    Empathy;    Precision medicine;    Multivariate;    Cortical thickness;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.02.026

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three decades of human MRI and postmortem data, emphasizing meta-analyses and other large studies, which collectively reveal few reliable sex/gender differences and a history of unreplicated claims. Males? brains are larger than females? from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance. Connectome differences and multivariate sex/gender prediction are largely based on brain size, and perform poorly across diverse populations. Task-based fMRI has especially failed to find reproducible activation differences between men and women in verbal, spatial or emotion processing due to high rates of false discovery. Overall, male/ female brain differences appear trivial and population-specific. The human brain is not ?sexually dimorphic.?

【 授权许可】

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