{
  "id": 11486825,
  "title": "Alignment with sex-typical brain architecture: Links to mood pathology, sex hormones and transcriptomics of neurodegenerative conditions",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/02/alignment-with-sex-typical-brain-architecture-links-to-mood-pathology",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-10-02T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.27.754773v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Recent research has explored the potential link between sex-typical brain architecture and mood pathology in various psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions. By applying imaging transcriptomics and multivariate analysis techniques to data from adolescent and adult samples, the study examined whether alignment with female-typical neural functional connectivity (FC) patterns could distinguish individuals with anxiety/depression or treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) from neurotypical controls. The findings suggest that increasing alignment with female-typical FC patterns, from sensory-perceptual to default mode regions, was associated with a lower risk of ADHD in children and tracked fluctuations in depressive symptoms in adult MDD patients. Moreover, the brain regions most strongly aligned with female-typical FC in depression/anxiety overlapped with genes involved in gonadal hormone synthesis and those dysregulated in female autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and male neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Huntington's disease (HD), and multiple sclerosis (MS). Conversely, the brain areas most strongly associated with male-typical FC patterns overlapped with genes related to androgen and estrogen receptors and those dysregulated in male ASD and female neurodegenerative conditions. These results suggest that the relationship between mood disorders and neurodegeneration may be influenced by regional reversals of sex-normative functional brain profiles.",
  "summary": "Understanding the mechanisms that underpin the pervasive sex bias in risk for specific psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions could substantially advance efforts promoting personalized medicine. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we applied imaging transcriptomics and multivariate analysis techniques to data from an adolescent sample enriched in anxiety/depression cases, a child…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}