Avila-Varela, Daniela S.Hidalgo-Lopez, EsmeraldaDagnino, Paulina ClaraAcero-Pousa, IreneAgua, Elvira deDeco, GustavoPletzer, BelindaEscrichs, Anira2025-03-272025-03-272024Avila-Varela DS, Hidalgo-Lopez E, Dagnino PC, Acero-Pousa I, Del Agua E, Deco G, et al. Whole-brain dynamics across the menstrual cycle: the role of hormonal fluctuations and age in healthy women. NPJ Womens Health. 2024;2:8. DOI: 10.1038/s44294-024-00012-41472-6874http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70032Recent neuroimaging research suggests that female sex hormone fluctuations modulate brain activity. Nevertheless, how brain network dynamics change across the female menstrual cycle remains largely unknown. Here, we investigated the dynamical complexity underlying three menstrual cycle phases (i.e., early follicular, pre-ovulatory, and mid-luteal) in 60 healthy naturally-cycling women scanned using resting-state fMRI. Our results revealed that the pre-ovulatory phase exhibited the highest dynamical complexity (variability over time) across the whole-brain functional network compared to the early follicular and mid-luteal phases, while the early follicular showed the lowest. Furthermore, we found that large-scale resting-state networks reconfigure along menstrual cycle phases. Multilevel mixed-effects models revealed age-related changes in the whole-brain, control, and dorsal attention networks, while estradiol and progesterone influenced the whole-brain, DMN, limbic, dorsal attention, somatomotor, and subcortical networks. Overall, these findings evidence that age and ovarian hormones modulate brain network dynamics along the menstrual cycle.application/pdfengThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Cicle menstrualCervellHormones sexualsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44294-024-00012-4info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess