Sex and Age Effects of Functional Connectivity in Early Adulthood

Abstract

Functional connectivity (FC) in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is widely used to find coactivating regions in the human brain. Despite its widespread use, the effects of sex and age on resting FC are not well characterized, especially during early adulthood. Here we apply regression and graph theoretical analyses to explore the effects of sex and age on FC between the 116 AAL atlas parcellations (a total of 6670 FC measures). rs-fMRI data of 494 healthy subjects (203 males and 291 females; age range: 22-36 years) from the Human Connectome Project were analyzed. We report the following findings. (1) Males exhibited greater FC than females in 1352 FC measures (1025 survived Bonferroni correction;