Sex-Related Variations in the Brain Motor-Network Connectivity at Rest during Puberty

Abstract

The development of functional neuroimaging technologies has resulted in a flood of mathematical models that investigate functional brain connections in health and disease. Motor network activity in the resting state and its response to puberty remains to be investigated. Variations between sexes in puberty may appear not just in brain regions involved in sexual and emotional activities, but also in cognitive and motor abilities that are active even when the individual is resting. The aim of this study was to investigate the interactions of the motor subnetwork in the resting state of healthy males and females aged 12 and 16. This study used the OpenNeuro Dataset ds004169:1.0.7, Queensland Twin IMaging. The MRI signals were preprocessed to get adjacency matrices from the sensory/somatomotor and cerebellar networks in the Power atlas. Network topology was analyzed using the centrality measures of strength, hubness, and leverage. The strength of the nodes increases with age in both sex groups. Both sexes had right hemisphere dominance in the cerebellar-mouth subnetwork and left dominance in the cerebellar-hand subnetwork. Eleven leverage centrality regions were common to all groups, the most relevant were the Precuneus, the cingulum postcentral and the supplementary motor area. In both sexes, hubs at age 12 were detected only in the right hemisphere. This dominance was reduced at age 16. Understanding connectivity changes in the brain during rest may enable the identification of neurophysiological mechanisms of cognitive and behavioral development that may contribute to long-term psychological well-being in adolescents.