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Happy Fall from your ABCD Team!!We hope everyone is enjoying the waning days of summer and has a wonderful start to the school year! |
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 At the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting this past May, investigators from the Medical University of South Carolina, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Laureate Institute for Brain Research, and University of California San Diego presented new research from the ABCD Study showing that environmental factors (at the community and individual level) may impact development.
Community factors like high family stress and risk of lead exposure may be associated with poorer cognitive performance in youth. Individual factors like screen media activity, on the other hand, may be associated with positive or negative behaviors, depending on the type of activity. For example, youth engaging mostly in social media (e.g., video chatting), compared to other types of screen media (e.g., streaming movies), reported more physical activity and less family conflict.
It’s important to remember that these relationships are not necessarily causal, and that other factors likely are involved. Since the data were collected at a single point in time, the research is preliminary. The value of the ABCD Study is that data collected at future timepoints will show how these relationships change throughout adolescence.
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Easing Back Into School
It’s that time of year again! Store aisles are filling with backpacks, notebooks, and highlighters, preparing for the upcoming back-to-school rush. For many families, summer has been a time of more freedom and outdoor adventures – of trips to the beach or pool, family vacations, and lazy afternoons eating ice pops.
So how do we transition ourselves and our children into the school year?
There are many things to consider: From getting back on a sleep schedule, to updating school wardrobes, preparing school supplies, creating ideal study spaces, reviewing last year’s learning, and easing into a more structured schedule.
Not sure where to begin? Scholastic’s “School Success Guides” may be a helpful resource. These guides review general curricula for each grade, including what to expect in each subject. They also include fun at-home activities – For example, reading articles together as a family and discussing the main ideas; and incorporating math into everyday life (e.g. creating a budget, changing measurements in a recipe, figuring out travel distances).
Visit the Scholastic site to discover more at-home activities and find out what to expect in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades! |
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 We love reading the questions participants ask on their assessment feedback forms! Here is a recent question from a student participant about how the ABCD Study works:
“How much data is there, and how does the ABCD Study use the data to understand adolescent development?”
 The ABCD Study is collecting data from nearly 12,000 participants at 21 sites across the country. So far, this amounts to about 150 terabytes, or 150,000 gigabytes of data! For comparison, consider this: In 2016, the total amount of video data uploaded to YouTube per day was about 24 terabytes (Photo and info: https://www.howtogeek.com/353116/how-big-are-gigabytes-terabytes-and-petabytes/).
Data from the ABCD Study come from lots of different types of assessments – brain scans, puzzles and games, and interviews about culture and environment, hobbies, and health, including sleep and nutrition. This means that scientists can ask a wide range of questions about how biological, behavioral, and environmental factors impact teen development. Questions like, does playing team sports improve mental health? Does nutrition affect brain development? How do peer influences contribute to risky behaviors? Since participants return every year for follow-up visits, scientists can see how development changes over time. Ultimately, knowledge gained from the ABCD Study will be used to identify ways to improve teen health and well-being.
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