What was the research about?
The brain’s “rich-club” is a group of tightly connected regions, with the name coming from the observation that high-income individuals are well connected across society and highly connected to each other. These regions work closely together to communicate and connect information from different parts of the brain, and are involved in different kinds of thinking processes. Early research has shown that the organization of rich-club changes with age, but there is still a lot to learn about how such changes happen in different brain waves (such as slow and fast waves which are important for different functions), what the patterns are across the lifespan, or if there are differences between males and females.
What did the researchers do?
Researchers used a brain imaging technique known as MEG to measure brain waves in 479 males and females between the ages of 4 and 39 from the general population. Different types of brain waves were used to measure how well each individual’s brain network was organized into the rich-club, as it may vary from person to person. They also looked at whether this organization developed differently in males and females.
What did the researchers find?
We found that the rich-club develops differently in males and females and this difference depends on specific types of brain waves. In males, when looking at slower brain waves, the rich-club becomes more apparent as they age. In other words, brain regions become more deeply interconnected. On the other hand, females show more changes over time with both slow and fast brain waves. Like the males, female rich-club organization increases during childhood, but it begins to decline in youth into adulthood, with regions become less interconnected.
Take home message
Our research shows that the brain’s rich-club network develops differently in males and females. This is important to understand how the brain works and how certain brain disorders may affect males and females differently. For example, males may have more efficient brain network, but this could make them more vulnerable to disorders like schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Females, alternatively, may have a more spread-out brain network that supports better social cognition and verbal ability, but could make them more vulnerable to disorders that involve multiple brain regions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Only the advance methods that measure different types of brain waves used in the study could provide a full picture of how brain function differs in males and females. Ultimately, sex-related differences in brain function are important to better understand brain health and disease across an individual’s lifetime.
The full research article can be accessed at this link: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(23)00461-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2589004223004613%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Reference (APA):
Vandewouw, M., Pang, E. W., Lai, M., Kelley, E., Ayub, M., Lerch, J. P., Taylor, M. J., Anagnostou, E. (2023). Richer than we thought: neurophysiological methods reveal rich-club network development is frequency- and sex-dependent. iScience, 26(4):106384. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106384.