Sex-biased trajectories of amygdalo-hippocampal morphology change over human development

Abstract

The amygdala and hippocampus are two adjacent allocortical structures implicated in sex-biased and developmentally-emergent psychopathology. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics of amygdalo-hippocampal development remain poorly understood in healthy humans. The current study defined trajectories of volume and shape change for the amygdala and hippocampus by applying a multi-atlas segmentation pipeline (MAGeT-Brain) and semi-parametric mixed-effects spline modeling to 1,529 longitudinally-acquired structural MRI brain scans from a large, single-center cohort of 792 youth (403 males, 389 females) between the ages of 5 and 25 years old. We found that amygdala and hippocampus volumes both follow curvilinear and sexually dimorphic growth trajectories. These sex-biases were particularly striking in the amygdala: males showed a significantly later and slower adolescent deceleration in volume expansion (at age 20 years) than females (age 13 years). Shape analysis localized significant hot-spots of sex-biased anatomical development in sub-regional territories overlying rostral and caudal extremes of the CA1/2 in the hippocampus, and the centromedial nuclear group of the amygdala. In both sexes, principal components analysis revealed close integration of amygdala and hippocampus shape change along two main topographically-organized axes – low vs. high areal expansion, and early vs. late growth deceleration. These results (i) bring greater resolution to our spatiotemporal understanding of amygdalo-hippocampal development in healthy males and females, and (ii) uncover focal sex-differences in the structural maturation of the brain components that may contribute to differences in behavior and psychopathology that emerge during adolescence.

Prenatal metal mixtures and sex-specific infant negative affectivity

“…However, future research that is designed to investigate cortisol as a mediating factor linking metals exposure with neurodevelopmental outcomes is of interest and would contribute to the field. Other research has shown significant sex differences in amygdala growth trajectories 103 , 104 and activity in response to novel and fearful stimuli. 105 – 110 In the present study, we found that girls displayed more fearful behaviors compared with boys and that the divergence in scores increased with increasing metals exposure.…”

The relationship between childhood stress and distinct stages of dynamic behavior monitoring in adults: neural and behavioral correlates

“…Participants were recruited from Shenzhen University through online and public postings. All postings specified the inclusion criteria of the study: (i) male [to control sex effect on cortisol response ( Liu et al ., 2019 ) and sex-based differences in the development of the hippocampus and amygdala ( Fish et al., 2020 )]; (ii) normal hearing ability and physically healthy; (iii) no habit of staying up late and (iv) no psychiatric disorders including depression, etc. All eligible participants were further screened by the following exclusion criteria: (i) history of psychiatric or neurological disease, epilepsy or migraine; (ii) history of endocrine disorders (such as Cushing’s syndrome); (iii) history of other major chronic physiological diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, meningitis, severe kidney disease and malignant tumors; (iv) history of brain injury (such as brain surgery, cerebral hemorrhage and severe head trauma); (v) long-term use of antipsychotic, neurological or adrenocortical hormone drugs; (vi) long-term use of other medications; (vii) major operation in the past 6 months; and (viii) smoking (more than five cigarettes a day) and drinking habit (more than two alcoholic drinks daily).…”

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“…Among other policy-relevant results, the price of starred foods relative to unstarred foods was negatively associated with nutritional quality. This is consistent with the law of demand-a tenet of economics that predicts demand to increase in response to a decline in price [42]. As starred foods become more expensive relative to unstarred foods, the mix of purchase shifts toward unstarred foods and, hence, causes a reduction in nutritional quality.…”