Cerebral Asymmetry and the Effects of Sex and Handedness on Brain Structure: A Voxel-Based Morphometric Analysis of 465 Normal Adult Human Brains

By Catriona D. Good, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, John Ashburner, Richard N. Henson, Karl J. Friston, Richard S. J. Frackowiak. NeuroImage, 2001

1,270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to examine human brain asymmetry and the effects of sex and handedness on brain structure in 465 normal adults. We observed significant asymmetry of cerebral grey and white matter in the occipital, frontal, and temporal lobes (petalia), including Heschl's gyrus, planum temporale (PT) and the hippocampal formation. Males demonstrated increased leftward asymmetry within Heschl's gyrus and PT compared to females. There was no significant interaction between asymmetry and handedness and no main effect of handedness. There was a significant main effect of sex on brain morphology, even after accounting for the larger global volumes of grey and white matter in males. Females had increased grey matter volume adjacent to the depths of both central sulci and the left superior temporal sulcus, in right Heschl's gyrus and PT, in right inferior frontal and frontomarginal gyri and in the cingulate gyrus. Females had significantly increased grey matter concentration extensively and relatively symmetrically in the cortical mantle, parahippocampal gyri, and in the banks of the cingulate and calcarine sulci. Males had increased grey matter volume bilaterally in the mesial temporal lobes, entorhinal and perirhinal cortex, and in the anterior lobes of the cerebellum, but no regions of increased grey matter concentration.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Geometry and Topology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/643677b680b136a81c93ecb6b09e74efc3eca179

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Citations in the corpus

Atlasing location, asymmetry and inter-subject variability of white matter tracts in the human brain with MR diffusion tractography (2011, positive): “, 2007; Lebel and Beaulieu, 2009), and voxel-based analysis of T1-images (Good et al., 2001; Hervé et al., 2006, 2009).”
Why Are Autism Spectrum Conditions More Prevalent in Males? (2011, background): “In addition, independent of global differences in brain size, the amygdala in typical males tends to be larger than in females [22], and early in development the amygdala in autism is even more enlarged than that observed in typical males [23–25].”
A Baseline for the Multivariate Comparison of Resting-State Networks (2011, background): “Given the profound structural changes that occur with age (Good et al., 2001; Sowell et al., 2003; Østby et al., 2009; Tamnes et al., 2010), we performed additional analyses to address the extent to which decreases in low frequency power could be explained by decreases in GMC (see Appendix C).”
A comprehensive study of gray matter loss in patients with Alzheimer's disease using optimized voxel-based morphometry (2003, methodology): “A third approach would be to use segmented gray matter partitions for the normalization process, a method currently under development and evaluation (Good et al., 2001b ), but then use of priors for the segmentation might still be problematic.”
Brain templates and atlases (2012, background): “…differences arise from many factors, including hemispheric asymmetry, gender, ethnicity and disease (Geschwind and Galaburda, 1985; Good et al., 2001; Im et al., 2010; LeMaitre et al., 2005; Luders and Toga, 2010; Luders et al., 2004; Reuter and Fischl, 2011; Thiebaut de Schotten…”
Development of attentional networks: An fMRI study with children and adults (2005, methodology): “For volumetric analyses, the recently suggested optimized protocol for voxel-based morphometric (VBM) studies as implemented in SPM2 (Ashburner and Friston, 2000, 2001; Good et al., 2001a,b; Specht et al., 2003; Wilke et al., 2001) was applied.”
Aging, sexual dimorphism, and hemispheric asymmetry of the cerebral cortex: replicability of regional differences in volume. (2004, background): “right hemisphere protruding on the front, and the left hemisphere extending on the back [23, 26 ,28,60,81,84].”
White matter hemisphere asymmetries in healthy subjects and in schizophrenia: a diffusion tensor MRI study (2004, methodology): “White matter asymmetry has been explored primarily in studies of white matter volume of structures or in voxel-based concentration of white matter among subjects using structural MRI (Good et al., 2001; Pujol et al., 2002; Zhou et al., 2003).”
Hemispheric asymmetries in language-related pathways: A combined functional MRI and tractography study (2006, background): “, 2002) and voxel-based morphometry (Good et al., 2001) have revealed white matter asymmetries in temporal and frontal lobes.”
A curvature-based approach to estimate local gyrification on the cortical surface (2006, background): “…measures may be associated with other measures made point-wise throughout the cortex, such as gray matter (GM) distribution or cortical thickness (Good et al., 2001; Sowell et al., 2004; Narr et al., 2005), that may further elucidate sex differences in brain morphology or neuropathological…”
Brain maturation in adolescence and young adulthood: regional age-related changes in cortical thickness and white matter volume and microstructure. (2010, result): “Possible laterality effects could also have been investigated further, as asymmetry of GM, WM, and anisotropy have been reported in previous studies on adults (Good et al. 2001; Watkins et al. 2001; Büchel et al. 2004; Gong et al. 2005).”