Don’t miss out reading about this amazing work linking the SCAN to Parkinson’s disease. What are the best ways we could use this new knowledge?!

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Targeting the somato-cognitive action network (SCAN) rather than motor regions doubles efficacy of TMS treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Seems that various DBS targets for Parkinson’s are selectively connected to the SCAN rather than effector-specific motor regions.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

The highlight of my week was the publication of "Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder" in @nature.com. It's a great paper that shows how conceptual changes in fundamental neuroscience - the discovery of SCAN - can improve treatment 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scientists discover brain network that may cause Parkinson’s disease An “extraordinary” brain network discovery shows that Parkinson’s disease may not be a movement disorder after all

An “extraordinary” brain network discovery shows that Parkinson’s disease may not be a movement disorder after all

"Parkinson’s is not just a movement problem involving one body part. This study shows it is a whole-body brain network disorder that links movement, thinking, arousal and internal body control." —Michael Okun, neurologist at the University of Florida and medical director of the Parkinson’s Foundation

Scientists just discovered a key brain network affected by Parkinson’s disease. The finding could change how doctors understand symptoms and lead to better treatments. 🧠 bit.ly/4qdpLMf

Do not miss this incredibly important finding about the SCAN and Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Fantastic work showint how SCAN is related to Parkinson’s disease. Much promise for the future of battling the disease!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stimulant ADHD medications work differently than thought | WashU Medicine A study from WashU Medicine shows for the first time that commonly prescribed drugs for ADHD do not act on the brain’s attention circuitry.

What if we've misunderstood how ADHD stimulants work? WashU Medicine brain imaging and child neurology teams joined forces to uncover where in the brain these drugs act — knowledge that could improve how attention disorders are treated. medicine.washu.edu/news/stimula...

Amazing work by @benjaminkay.bsky.social and the @ndosenbach.bsky.social lab on the effect of stimulant medications on the brain! A must-read!

Diffusion MRI Processing in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study: Innovations and Applications The landmark ongoing HEALthy Brain and Cognitive Development (HBCD) study will longitudinally chart brain development in a large sample (projected n=7,200) of infants through age 10 years with multimo...

After years of development and testing, we are happy to present our work in "Diffusion MRI Processing in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study: Innovations and Applications"! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... A thread:

🎓 Congratulations Dr. Jin Yang!
Jin successfully defended his PhD thesis, "The Development of Deep-Learning-Based Automatic Multi-Organ Segmentation Models
from CT Images and their Clinical Evaluation", as part of the Imaging Science PhD Program at WashU!

Overall, there were significantly more aligned males than females in the sample (1,172 vs. 873), and unaligned females showed lower Youth Self-Report Gender Questionnaire scores than unaligned males — both patterns also observed in the full ABCD dataset (Potter et al., 2022, Developmental Cog Neuro)

Here is the frequency distribution of the (A) Youth Self-Report and (B) Parent-Report Gender Questionnaires from the Supplementary Materials.

This categorization was used for the SVM sex classification analyses. In contrast, the SVR analyses, which aimed to predict continuous sex/gender alignment scores, did not involve any categorization.

Just to clarify — I prefer “unaligned” since it simply describes a lack of alignment, without implying that something went wrong.

In my study, 46% of girls scored below the highest possible score on the Youth Self-Report Gender Questionnaire, placing them in the unaligned category.

I am grateful to everyone who contributed to this effort, for their hard work and the thoughtful discussions we shared throughout the process.
@roselynechauvin.bsky.social @gordonneuro.bsky.social @benjaminkay.bsky.social Babatunde Adeyemo Aristeidis Sotiras @ndosenbach.bsky.social

We show that rsFC captures the relationship between sex and gender more effectively that cortical thickness or cortical volume and challenge binary models of brain-sex differences, advocating for more inclusive and nuanced approaches to studying the relationship between gender and neurobiology.

Lastly, rsFC, cortical thickness, and cortical volume did not predict sex/gender alignment. While rsFC effectively captured the sex/gender relationship, the inability to predict sex/gender alignment suggests that gender is a complex construct harder to discern in brain function or structure.

One explanation is that males may face lower social tolerance for gender nonconformity, leading boys to feel pressured to answer gender-related questions less truthfully, resulting in high sex/gender alignment scores despite rsFC patterns less similar to the typical male profile.

In males, however, there was an unexpected negative correlation: Those with higher rsFC sex SVM scores showed lower sex/gender alignment.

In females, the extent to which their brain rsFC matched a female or male sex profile was positively associated with the degree of sex/gender alignment, with higher rsFC sex SVM scores corresponding to greater sex/gender alignment.

The rsFC sex classifier, trained solely on youth with sex/gender alignment, was significantly better at classifying individuals with sex/gender alignment than unalignment. This suggests that gender may have a greater influence on functional connectivity patterns than neuroanatomy.

Key brain networks involved in predicting sex include association networks (default mode, dorsal attention, and parietal memory) and visual networks (visual and medial visual).

We found that rsFC significantly outperforms cortical thickness and cortical volume in predicting sex. This suggests that even in a young cohort, resting neural activity patterns capture subtle, sex-specific functional dynamics that structural measures like cortical thickness/volume may not reveal.

We leveraged data from ~3,200 youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) in the USA and Support Vector Machine learning to predict both sex (assigned at birth) and sex/gender alignment (the congruence between sex and gender) from rsFC, cortical thickness, and cortical volume.

In this study we moved beyond previous work by evaluating whether rsFC, cortical thickness or cortical volume is more effective in predicting sex and gender, while also exploring the extent of their interrelationship within the brain of preadolescents.

Although many neurological and psychiatric conditions vary by sex in prevalence, onset, and symptomatology, possibly due to differences in brain structure or function, evidence on brain differences related to sex and gender remains inconclusive.

Is resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), cortical thickness (CT), or cortical volume more effective at capturing sex and gender differences in the brains of preadolescents?

Check out our new article (doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...) now out in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Ever wondered if your interesting brain-behavior correlation was over- or under-estimated due to head motion, but were afraid to ask? We’ve created a motion impact score for detecting spurious brain-behavior associations, now available in Nature Communications!
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

My med school textbook says stimulants like Ritalin treat hyperactivity by “stimulating” the brain’s attention and cognitive control systems. We studied children taking stimulants in the ABCD Study, and the largest differences were actually in arousal and reward networks! Check out our preprint!