Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain's connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv1, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders ' and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers. For example, women are about twice as likely as men to develop anxiety or depression2, and boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than girls3. 'We are very excited about this study, which to our knowledge is the first one to compare how sex differences in brain networks evolve over the lifespan,' says Amy Kuceyeski, a computational neuroimager at Weill Cornell Medicine in Ithaca, New York. However, some...
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