Gender-based functional connectivity differences in brain networks in childhood

•Understanding the effect of gender differences on the brain provides important information s for neuroscience.•We examined fuctional connectivity differences between brains of healthy girls and boys using rs-fMRI.•We performed FC and ALFF/fALFF analyzes using rs-fMRI data from NYU Child Study Center in ADHD200 database.•In the results of our study, in many of network regions higher FC and ALFF/fALFF increase were found in girls than boys.•However, the higher activation of female participants than males has concentrated in the left hemisphere of brain.•As conclusion, gender differences in the brain networks should be taken into consideration when examining childhood cognitive, normal maturation and neuropsychiatric disorders. Understanding the effect of gender differences on the brain can provide important information to characterize normal changes throughout life and to increase the likelihood of sex-specific approaches for neurological and psychiatric diseases. In this study, Functional Connectivity (FC), Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations (ALFF) and fractional ALFF (fALFF) analyzes will be compared between female and male brains between the ages of 7 and 18 years using resting state-functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). The rs-fMRI data in this study has been provided by The New York University (NYU) Child Study Center of the publicly shared ADHD200 database. From the NYU dataset, 68 (34 females, 34 males) healthy subjects in the age range of 7–18 years were selected. The female group (mean age: 12.3271±3.1380) and male group (mean age: 11.8766±2.9697) consisted of right-handed, small head motion and similar IQ values. FC was obtained by seed voxel analysis and the effect of low-frequency fluctuations on gender was examined by ALFF and fALFF analyses. Two-sample t-test was used to compare female and male groups with the significance thresholds set to FDR-corrected p