Both sex and gender associated with perivascular space in early adolescence
Poster No:
984
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Carinna Torgerson1, Haoyu Lan1, Hedyeh Ahmadi1, Megan Herting1, Jeiran Choupan1
Institutions:
1University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Perivascular spaces (PVS) are small extracellular compartments surrounding blood vessels that allow transport-mediated exchange of solutes between the blood and CSF (Bohr et al., 2022). Although MRI-visible PVS were long considered absent or rare in children, recent studies have observed quantifiable PVS in healthy children and adolescents (H. G. Kim et al., 2023; Lynch et al., 2023; Piantino et al., 2020; Yamamoto et al., 2024). Among adults, men have consistently been found to have larger PVS compared to women (Barisano et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2014). However, no sex differences were found in a study of neonatal PVS (J. Y. Kim et al., 2023). Two studies have reported sex differences in adolescents, with PVS occupying a larger proportion of regional brain volume on average in boys compared to girls (Lynch et al., 2023; Yamamoto et al., 2024). Given the wide age ranges of these previous studies (8-21 years old and 12-21 years old, respectively), it remains unclear when exactly these sex differences develop. To date, no studies have explored the relationship between gender and PVS.
Methods:
This study used a sample of 6,611 youths ages 9 to 11 years old from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® to investigate sex and gender differences in PVS in the white matter of the centrum semiovale, cingulate, and frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes. Sex was categorized as male or female based on the X and Y allele frequency from blood samples. Felt-gender was assessed using two questions ("How much do you feel like a boy" and "How much do you feel like a girl") scored on a Likert scale and averaged. Using T1-weighted and T2-weighted images, we created an enhanced perivascular space contrast image (Sepehrband et al., 2019). This image was used as input in a weakly supervised perivascular space segmentation algorithm developed by Lan et al., (2023). We used mixed-effects modeling to examine whether sex and gender are associated with regional PVS volume fraction or the number of PVS (count) during early adolescence. The null model included regional volume, age, pubertal development, maximum parental education, race/ethnicity, BMI z-score, and MRI scanner type as fixed effects and data collection site was included as a random effect (i.e. the nesting of subjects within sites). The sex model was created by adding sex as a fixed effect to the null model. The gender model was created by adding felt-gender to the null model. We added both sex and felt-gender to the null model to create the sex + gender model. For the interaction model, we added sex, felt-gender, and the interaction between sex and felt-gender to the null model as fixed effects. Additionally, we used the Kruskal-Wallis test to determine whether the between-sex differences exceeded the within-sex differences.
Results:
We found that sex was significantly associated with PVS count and volume fraction in all regions examined. The addition of felt-gender to the sex model did not improve model fit for PVS volume fraction but did significantly improve model fit for PVS count in all regions, except for the temporal lobe. The addition of a sex-by-gender interaction did not improve model fit in any regions. In the model with both sex and felt-gender, both variables were significantly associated with PVS count after correction for multiple comparisons (p < 0.05).
Conclusions:
This study is the first to examine the relationship between felt-gender and PVS. Our finding of a significant relationship between felt-gender and the number of MR-visible PVS suggests that both biological and social factors may influence PVS structure. Our work underscores the need for more work disentangling the complex interplay between sex and gender in cerebrovascular development. Furthermore, these results suggest that the number of PVS and their size may reflect different facets of development.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Neuroscience Other
Lifespan Development:
Early life, Adolescence, Aging 1
Neuroanatomy, Physiology, Metabolism and Neurotransmission:
Neuroanatomy Other 2
Keywords:
Development
MRI
PEDIATRIC
Sexual Dimorphism
White Matter
Other - Perivascular Space
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Provide references using APA citation style.
Bohr, T., et al. (2022). The glymphatic system: Current understanding and modeling. IScience, 25(9).
Kim, H. G., et al. (2023). MRI-visible Dilated Perivascular Space in the Brain by Age: The Human Connectome Project. Radiology, 306(3), e213254. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.213254
Kim, J. Y., et al. (2023). MRI-visible Perivascular Spaces in the Neonatal Brain. Radiology, 307(2), e221314. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.221314
Lan, H., et al. (2023). Weakly supervised perivascular spaces segmentation with salient guidance of frangi filter. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 89(6), 2419–2431. https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.29593
Lynch, K. M., et al. (2023). Brain perivascular space imaging across the human lifespan. Neuroimage, 271, 120009.
Piantino, J., et al. (2020). Characterization of MR Imaging–Visible Perivascular Spaces in the White Matter of Healthy Adolescents at 3T. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 41(11), 2139–2145. https://doi.org/10.3174/ajnr.A6789
Sepehrband, F., et al. (2019). Image processing approaches to enhance perivascular space visibility and quantification using MRI. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 12351. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-48910-x
Yamamoto, E. A., et al. (2024). Biological sex and BMI influence the longitudinal evolution of adolescent and young adult MRI-visible perivascular spaces. bioRxiv, 2024.08.17.608337. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.08.17.608337
Zhang, C., et al. (2014). Risk Factors of Dilated Virchow-Robin Spaces Are Different in Various Brain Regions. PLoS ONE, 9(8), e105505. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0105505