NIH offers up ground-breaking dataset on adolescent brain development and health

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released a dataset nonpareil taken from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest US longitudinal study of brain development and child health, with contributions from leading experts in the fields of adolescent development and neuroscience.

The NIH released data obtained from the study’s first 4,500 participants. The information takes up about 30 terabytes of data—three times the magnitude of the entire collection at the Library of Congress.

According to the NIH, the dataset “will be available to scientists worldwide to conduct research on the many factors that influence brain, cognitive, social, and emotional development.”

The release includes high-quality baseline data from 9- and 10-year old children, including the following:

• participant demographics
• culture and environment
• neurocognition
• physical and mental health assessments
• substance use
• biological data (ie, pubertal hormone analysis)
• tabulated structural and functional neuroimaging
• minimally processed brain images

“Sharing ABCD data and other related datasets with the research community, in an infrastructure that allows easy query, data access, and cloud computation, will help us understand many aspects of health and human development. These datasets provide extraordinary opportunities for computational neuroscientists to address problems with direct public health relevance,” says Joshua A. Gordon, MD, PhD, director of NIMH, Washington, DC.

By design, the ABCD study includes a diverse population reflective of US demographics, with recruitment from 21 study sites throughout the country. Enrollment is not yet complete. To date, 7,637 children have been enrolled, including 1,238 twins/multiples. The goal, by the end of 2018, is a total of 11,500 children, who will be followed for 10 years. Researchers will collect data semi-annually and annually via interviews and behavioral testing. Neuroimaging will be done every 2 years to measure changes in brain structure and function.

With the availability of this dataset, researchers will be able to test research questions that will better inform future policy and public health decisions. For instance, researchers can now examine how sports injuries affect developmental outcomes. Or, how genetic and environmental factors impact brain development.

“By sharing this interim baseline dataset with researchers now,” says Nora D. Volkow, MD, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Washington, DC, “the ABCD study is enabling scientists to begin analyzing and publishing novel research on the developing adolescent brain. As expected, drug use is minimal among this young cohort, which is critical because it will allow us to compare brain images before and after substance use begins within individuals who start using, providing needed insight into how experimentation with drugs, alcohol and nicotine affect developing brains.”