A special issue of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience features more than a dozen articles related to the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a landmark study on brain development and child health led by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in collaboration with eight other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The special issue is an overview of the ABCD Study and includes articles about the rationale for the study, its design and recruitment strategy, assessment protocols and neuroimaging parameters, the inclusion of twins in the research design, biomedical ethics and clinical oversight, and retention considerations, among others. All articles were written by ABCD Consortium members and NIH collaborators.
It is anticipated that findings from the ABCD Study will contribute to our understanding of how childhood experiences, such as sports, video games, social media, unhealthy sleep patterns, and smoking, among many others interact with each other and with a child’s changing biology to affect brain development and social, behavioral, academic, health, and other outcomes over time.
In February of this year, the ABCD Consortium, in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive, released to the scientific community the first publicly available dataset from the ABCD Study that includes baseline data from the first ~4500 participants. There are now over 9,700 participants enrolled in 21 sites across the nation, with a goal of enrolling nearly 12,000 participants by the end of the recruitment period later this year. Participants are recruited at ages 9 to 10 and will be followed for ten years into early adulthood.
The special issue in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience can be found in its entirety at: The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Consortium: Rationale, Aims, and Assessment Strategy.
For more information about the ABCD Study, go to: Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD Study).
For more information, contact the NIDA press office at media@nida.nih.gov or 301-443-6245. Follow NIDA on Twitter and Facebook. The NIDA website is www.drugabuse.gov.
Leave A Comment