Produção Nacional
Revisado por pares
Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men
2023; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 120; Issue: 20 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1073/pnas.2218782120
ISSN1091-6490
AutoresAndré Zugman, Luz María Alliende, Vicente Medel, Richard A.I. Bethlehem, Jakob Seidlitz, Grace Ringlein, Celso Arango, Aurina Arnatkevičiūtė, Laila Asmal, Mark A. Bellgrove, Vivek Benegal, Miquel Bernardo, Pablo Billeke, Jorge Bosch‐Bayard, Rodrigo A. Bressan, Geraldo F. Busatto, Mariana N. Castro, Tiffany M. Chaim‐Avancini, Albert Compte, Monise Costanzi, Letícia Sanguinetti Czepielewski, Paola Dazzan, Camilo de la Fuente‐Sandoval, Marta Di Forti, Covadonga M. Díaz‐Caneja, Ana M. Díaz‐Zuluaga, Stefan S. du Plessis, Fábio Duran, Sol Fittipaldi, Alex Fornito, Nelson B. Freimer, Ary Gadelha, Clarissa Severino Gama, Ranjini Garani Ramesh, Clemente García‐Rizo, Cecilia González Campo, Alfonso González‐Valderrama, Salvador M. Guinjoan, Bharath Holla, Agustín Ibáñez, Daniza Ivanovic, Andrea Parolin Jackowski, Pablo León-Ortíz, Christine Löchner, Carlos López‐Jaramillo, Hilmar Luckhoff, Raffael Massuda, Philip McGuire, Jun Miyata, Romina Mizrahi, Robin M. Murray, Ayşegül Özerdem, Pedro Mário Pan, Mara Parellada, Lebogan Phahladira, Juan Pablo Ramírez-Mahaluf, Ramiro Reckziegel, Tiago Reis Marques, Francisco Reyes-Madrigal, Annerine Roos, Pedro Rosa‐Neto, Giovanni Abrahão Salum, Freda Scheffler, Günter Schumann, Maurício H. Serpa, Dan J. Stein, Ángeles Tepper, Jeggan Tiego, Tsukasa Ueno, Juan Undurraga, Eduardo A. Undurraga, Pedro A. Valdés‐Sosa, Isabel Valli, Mirta F. Villarreal, Toby Winton‐Brown, Nefize Yalın, Francisco Zamorano, Marcus V. Zanetti, Anderson M. Winkler, Daniel S. Pine, Sara Evans‐Lacko, Nicolás Crossley, Pratima Murthy, Amit Chakrabarti, Debasish Basu, B. N. Subodh, Lenin Singh, Roshan Lourembam Singh, Kartik Kalyanram, Kamakshi Kartik, Kalyanaraman Kumaran, Ghattu V. Krishnaveni, Rebecca Kuriyan, Sunita Simon Kurpad, Gareth J. Barker, Rose Dawn Bharath, Sylvane Desrivières, Meera Purushottam, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Eesha Sharma, Matthew Hickman, Jon Heron, Mireille B. Toledano, Nilakshi Vaidya,
Tópico(s)Cognitive Abilities and Testing
ResumoGender inequality across the world has been associated with a higher risk to mental health problems and lower academic achievement in women compared to men. We also know that the brain is shaped by nurturing and adverse socio-environmental experiences. Therefore, unequal exposure to harsher conditions for women compared to men in gender-unequal countries might be reflected in differences in their brain structure, and this could be the neural mechanism partly explaining women's worse outcomes in gender-unequal countries. We examined this through a random-effects meta-analysis on cortical thickness and surface area differences between adult healthy men and women, including a meta-regression in which country-level gender inequality acted as an explanatory variable for the observed differences. A total of 139 samples from 29 different countries, totaling 7,876 MRI scans, were included. Thickness of the right hemisphere, and particularly the right caudal anterior cingulate, right medial orbitofrontal, and left lateral occipital cortex, presented no differences or even thicker regional cortices in women compared to men in gender-equal countries, reversing to thinner cortices in countries with greater gender inequality. These results point to the potentially hazardous effect of gender inequality on women's brains and provide initial evidence for neuroscience-informed policies for gender equality.
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