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A mosaic of sex-related structural changes in the human brain following exposure to real-life stress

Brain Structure and Function volume 225, pages 461–466 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Whereas sex differences in the brain’s response to stress have been reported in both humans and animals, it is unknown whether they ‘add up’ consistently within individual brains. Here, we studied this question in a unique data set of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans obtained before and after exposure to extreme real-life stress in the form of combative military service in 34 (15 women) young (18–19 years old) healthy soldiers. Across two data sets, one of regional volume and one of cortical thickness, only a few regions (seven and three, respectively) showed sex/gender-specific changes (i.e., the most common structural change in women and men was different). The number of internally consistent brains (a male-typical or a female-typical response in all regions) was not different from the number expected by chance nor from that observed in regions showing a sex-similar response, and was lower than the number of mosaic brains (at least one region with a male-typical response and one with a female-typical response). Although these findings do not reveal the source of sex/gender differences in response to stress and of within-brain variability in this response, they demonstrate that these differences do not consistently add up to create a female-typical and a male-typical neural response to stress.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Talma Hendler from Tel-Aviv University and Sagol Brain Institute, Radiology section, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel, for providing access to the fMRI data of this project. Special thanks to all of the soldiers who volunteered for this study. This work is dedicated to the memory of staff sergeant Yotam Gilboa who volunteered for this study and was later killed during his military service at the age of 21. This work was partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 217/16 to DJ). Dr. Admon was supported by the Israeli Council for Higher Education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Guy Shalev & Daphna Joel

  2. Sagol School of Neuoroscience, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Guy Shalev, Zohar Berman & Daphna Joel

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Roee Admon

  4. The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBRC), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Roee Admon

  5. Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Zohar Berman

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  1. Guy Shalev
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  2. Roee Admon
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  3. Zohar Berman
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  4. Daphna Joel
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Correspondence to Daphna Joel.

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All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional committee (Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center Ethics Committee, 05-262) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Shalev, G., Admon, R., Berman, Z. et al. A mosaic of sex-related structural changes in the human brain following exposure to real-life stress. Brain Struct Funct 225, 461–466 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01995-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01995-6

Keywords

  • Combat-related stress
  • Sex differences
  • Gender differences
  • MRI