A Landmark Study Examines How Childhood Experiences Affect Adolescent Brain Development
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will receive $4.7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to participate in a landmark study with 20 other research centers that will examine how childhood experiences and habits affect brain development and, ultimately, social, behavioral, academic, and health outcomes.
The NIH initiative, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, will follow approximately 10,000 children for 10 years, beginning at ages 9 and 10, through adolescence, and into early adulthood. Researchers will use advanced brain imaging, interviews, and behavioral testing to determine how video games, school sports, sleep habits, social media, smoking, alcohol, and drug use interact with each other and with a child’s changing biology to alter the development of the brain over the short and long terms.
Rita Goldstein, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, and Neuroscience, and Chief of the Neuropsychoimaging of Addiction and Related Conditions research group and the Brain Imaging Core at the Icahn School of Medicine, is Mount Sinai’s principal investigator on the study. Dr. Goldstein and her team will collaborate with Yale University to recruit more than 1,000 children, an effort that will unfold over the next two years through partnerships with public and private schools.
The ABCD study is “a paradigm shift for the brain development study,” says Dr. Goldstein. “Multimodal neuroimaging studies to uncover brain mechanisms that could change over time with development and shed light on health, resilience, and vulnerability factors have not been conducted at this scale before, making this project both exciting and crucially important.”
An additional partnership with BJ Casey, PhD, the study’s principal investigator at Yale, will enable Dr. Goldstein’s team to study the cortical-subcortical pathways that underlie select behaviors crucial during the adolescent years.
“Such early identification of the dynamics of brain states, pathways, and mechanisms is crucial for enhancing the understanding of factors that may contribute to certain behaviors,” says Dr. Goldstein. “We will also be able to identify the brain circuits and pathways that may predispose to or protect against certain risks. The identification of mechanisms underlying resilience has always been an important focus at Mount Sinai.”
Ultimately, the study is expected to provide parents, school principals and teachers, medical professionals, and public policymakers with useful data to promote the health, well-being, and success of children.
“We know the brain is still developing well into the mid-20s, making it vulnerable to a host of influences,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, in announcing the initiative. “With several NIH institutes and centers working together on this important study, we will be able to learn how a variety of biological events and environmental exposures affect brain development, giving us greater insight into what helps adolescents traverse that potentially tumultuous time to become healthy and productive adults.”
For additional information, please call 844-422-2301, email: abcd@mssm.edu, or visit our web sign-up page: http://tinyurl.com/mssm-ABCD.
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