A growing number of hospitals and community cancer centers, which treat the majority of the nation’s cancer patients, are launching survivorship-care programs. These include treatment follow-up plans, physical rehabilitation and emotional assistance, such as counseling and support groups. They resemble programs currently offered by big urban cancer centers like MD Anderson in Houston and Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York.

Chemotherapy and radiation can damage vital organs such as the heart and liver, possibly causing secondary diseases years later. The body can be debilitated, cognitive functions impaired and emotions distressed, making return to normal life and work difficult. Some 70% of cancer survivors experience depression at some point. Patients have higher levels of anxiety years after the disease is cured. And there is always the chance that cancer will return.

More patients are expected to face such health issues as the number of cancer survivors grows, partly due to improved early detection and treatment.

The Commission on Cancer, a consortium of professional organizations that accredits U.S. cancer centers treating 70% of newly diagnosed patients, will begin in 2015 requiring that they provide survivorship-care plans for their patients.

“I tell patients now we are going to follow you for your entire lifetime,” says W. Larry Gluck, an oncologist and medical director of the Greenville Health System’s Cancer Institute, in Greenville, S.C., which set up a Center for Integrative Oncology and Survivorship in 2011. “The mental and physical needs of cancer patients go on long after therapy has been completed.” In the past, patients typically were sent back to their family doctor, who might have little knowledge of delayed side effects or complications of treatment and recurrence risks, Dr. Gluck says.

There are close to 14 million cancer survivors living in the U.S., a number that is expected to grow to 18 million by 2022, according to the National Cancer Institute. About 40% have been alive 10 years or more after diagnosis (including this reporter, a leukemia survivor).

Private health insurers and Medicare typically cover cancer patients’ medical visits, during which some survivorship-care planning can take place. Cancer centers say some private insurers consider survivorship planning a necessary service. A bill currently in congressional committee, the Planning Actively for Cancer Treatment Act would require Medicare to cover care-planning services at diagnosis and once cancer patients finish treatment.

Nonprofit groups like Cancer Support Community, which was formed in 2009 through the merger of two of the largest support organizations, Gilda’s Club and the Wellness Community, offer free services including personalized assessment and care plans, distress screening, support groups and complementary therapies such as yoga and meditation. Last year, it announced a partnership with Greenville to incorporate its services into the hospital system as part of the recent survivorship center.

“Cancer hospitals are realizing that they have to be a one-stop shop, taking care not just of the body, but of the mind and soul of the survivor,” says Kim Thiboldeaux, chief executive officer of Cancer Support Community.

Renee Gossman, 71, a personal trainer who teaches water aerobics, was diagnosed at the Greenville Cancer Institute with uterine cancer in January 2012. She had a hysterectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. Ms. Gossman, who doesn’t have a lot of family living nearby, says she was fatigued and felt isolated during nearly a year of treatment. “You get through all of that, and then it’s like, what’s going to happen now?” she says.

Ms. Gossman says her oncologist, Larry Puls, referred her late last year to Greenville’s survivorship center where she met with a social worker, a nurse navigator and a dietitian. She received a summary of her treatment, copies of her pathology reports, a follow-up plan and a summary of other programs and activities she might find helpful.

“They give you a team of people who are going to look after you, get you back involved in the world and see to your physical, social and emotional needs,” Ms. Gossman says. She started a 12-week exercise program at the center that focuses on restoring aerobic conditioning, muscular strength and flexibility. She also began taking yoga classes and a writing workshop through the Cancer Support Community program at Greenville. Ms. Gossman currently volunteers once a week as a greeter in the lobby of the cancer institute.

Other services offered at Greenville include free nutrition counseling and help with the after-effects of specific cancers, such as swelling, called lymphedema, that often occurs after breast-cancer surgery.

Patients, and their caregivers, are encouraged to use the survivorship center as a resource, says Regina Franco, a nurse practitioner and manager of the survivorship center. “If you hear on the news that you should be taking vitamin E, call us and ask, ‘Is this really something I should be doing?’ “

Greenville recently joined with researchers at the University of South Carolina to open a human-performance lab that will assess patients before and after treatment, billed as an office visit.

One area of research: how cancer and chemotherapy affect energy production at the cellular level and how exercise might restore some of the damage. Also being studied is the impact of complementary therapies such as yoga, massage and acupuncture, Dr. Gluck says.

Many smaller cancer centers and oncology practices are using a software program called Journey Forward, created by a group of advocacy organizations and health companies, to create customized follow-up plans. The program, which includes resources for both doctors and patients, has been downloaded about 30,000 times since it was launched in 2009, says Shelley Fuld Nasso, chief executive of the nonprofit National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, which helped develop the software. For cancer survivors, “things can come up many years down the road that you aren’t expecting or prepared for,” she says.

Write to Laura Landro at laura.landro@wsj.com

So many things come down to connections—especially the ones in your brain.

Women and men display distinctive differences in how nerve fibers connect various regions of their brains, according to a half-dozen recent studies that highlight gender variation in the brain’s wiring diagram. There are trillions of these critical connections, and they are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience and biochemistry.

No one knows how gender variations in brain wiring might translate into thought and behavior—whether they might influence the way men and women generally perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially—but they are sparking controversy.

“It certainly is incendiary,” said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Southern California’s Imaging Genetics Center. He is directing an effort to assemble a database of 26,000 brain scans from 20 countries to cross-check neuroimaging findings. “People who look at findings about sex differences are excited or enraged,” he said.

Researchers are looking at the variations to explain the different ways men and women respond to health issues ranging from autism, which is more common among men, and multiple sclerosis, which is more common among women, to strokes, aging and depression. “We have to find the differences first before we can try to understand them,” said Neda Jahanshad, a neurologist at USC who led the research while at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Jahanshad and her UCLA collaborators conducted a 2011 brain-imaging study of healthy twins, including 147 women and 87 men, to trace connections in the brain. She discovered “significant” sex differences in areas of the brain’s frontal lobe, which is associated with self-control, speech and decision-making.

In the most comprehensive study so far, scientists led by biomedical analyst Ragini Verma at the University of Pennsylvania found the myriad connections between important parts of the brain developed differently in girls and boys as they grow, resulting in different patterns of brain connections among young women and young men.

The team imaged the brains of 949 healthy young people, 521 females and 428 males, ranging in age from 8 to 22. Like Dr. Jahanshad’s team, Dr. Verma employed a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging to trace how water molecules align along the brain’s white-matter nerve fibers, which form the physical scaffolding of thought. The study was reported earlier this month in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The neural patterns emerged only when combining results from hundreds of people, experts said. In any one person, gender patterns may be subsumed by the individual variations in brain shape and structure that help make every person unique.

Dr. Verma’s maps of neural circuitry document the brain at moments when it is in a fury of creation. Starting in infancy, the brain normally produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute, and reaches out to make connections two million times a second. By age 5, brain size on average has grown to about 90% of adult size. By age 20, the average brain is packed with about 109,000 miles of white matter tissue fibers, according to a 2003 Danish study reported in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

Spurred by the effects of diet, experience and biochemistry, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, starting in childhood. The winnowing continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age. “In childhood, we did not see much difference” between male and female, Dr. Verma said. “Most of the changes we see start happening in adolescence. That is when most of the male-female differences come about.”

Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. “Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres,” Dr. Verma said. “Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front.”

That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative.

Experts also cautioned that subtle gender differences in connections can be thrown off by normal disparities in brain size between men and women and in the density of brain tissue. Other factors, such as whether one is left- or right-handed, also affect brain structure.

Also affecting results are differences in how computer calculations are carried out from one lab to the next. “With neuroimaging, there are so many ways to process the data that when you do process things differently and get the same result, it is fantastic,” Dr. Jahanshad said.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com