NDLI: Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Olfactory Bulb: Females Have More Neurons and Glial Cells than Males

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Oliveira Pinto, Ana V. Santos, Raquel M. Coutinho, Renan A. Oliveira, Lays M. Santos, Gláucia B. Alho, Ana T. L. Leite, Renata E. P. Farfel, José M. Suemoto, Claudia K. Grinberg, Lea T. Pasqualucci, Carlos A. Wilson, Jacob-filho Lent, Roberto
Editor	Ravel, Nadine
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	Sex differences in the human olfactory function reportedly exist for olfactory sensitivity, odorant identification and memory, and tasks in which odors are rated based on psychological features such as familiarity, intensity, pleasantness, and others. Which might be the neural bases for these behavioral differences? The number of cells in olfactory regions, and especially the number of neurons, may represent a more accurate indicator of the neural machinery than volume or weight, but besides gross volume measures of the human olfactory bulb, no systematic study of sex differences in the absolute number of cells has yet been undertaken. In this work, we investigate a possible sexual dimorphism in the olfactory bulb, by quantifying postmortem material from 7 men and 11 women (ages 55–94 years) with the isotropic fractionator, an unbiased and accurate method to estimate absolute cell numbers in brain regions. Female bulbs weighed 0.132 g in average, while male bulbs weighed 0.137 g, a non-significant difference; however, the total number of cells was 16.2 million in females, and 9.2 million in males, a significant difference of 43.2%. The number of neurons in females reached 6.9 million, being no more than 3.5 million in males, a difference of 49.3%. The number of non-neuronal cells also proved higher in women than in men: 9.3 million and 5.7 million, respectively, a significant difference of 38.7%. The same differences remained when corrected for mass. Results demonstrate a sex-related difference in the absolute number of total, neuronal and non-neuronal cells, favoring women by 40–50%. It is conceivable that these differences in quantitative cellularity may have functional impact, albeit difficult to infer how exactly this would be, without knowing the specific circuits cells make. However, the reported advantage of women as compared to men may stimulate future work on sex dimorphism of synaptic microcircuitry in the olfactory bulb.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111733
Starting Page	111733
File Format	PDF
ISSN	19326203
e-ISSN	19326203
Journal	PLoS ONE
Issue Number	11
Volume Number	9
Language	English
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Publisher Date	2014-11-01
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	Public Library of Science
Subject Keyword	Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all) Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all) Medicine(all) Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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