Research Publications

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Minorities’ diminished returns (MDRs) refer to weaker effects of socioeconomic status (SES) indicators such as parental educational attainment and family income in generating tangible childhood outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities compared to the majority group, a pattern prevalent in the US. Our existing knowledge is minimal, however, about diminished returns of family SES on reducing exposure to childhood trauma.

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A wide array of socioeconomic status (SES) indicators tend to show differential effects for members of diverse social groups. Limited knowledge exists on ethnic variation in the effects of family income on delay discounting which is predictor of risk behaviors.

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There are known associations between mental health symptoms and transgender identity among adults. Whether this relationship extends to early adolescents and to gender domains other than identity is unclear. This study measured dimensions of gender in a large, diverse, sample of youth, and examined associations between diverse gender experiences and mental health.

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Working memory function changes across development and varies across individuals. The patterns of behavior and brain function that track individual differences in working memory during human development, however, are not well understood. Here, we establish associations between working memory, other cognitive abilities, and functional MRI (fMRI) activation in data from over 11,500 9- to 10-year-old children (both sexes) enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, an ongoing longitudinal study in the United States. Behavioral analyses reveal robust relationships between working memory, short-term memory, language skills, and fluid intelligence. Analyses relating out-of-scanner working memory performance to memory-related fMRI activation in an emotional -back task demonstrate that frontoparietal activity during a working memory challenge indexes working memory performance. This relationship is domain specific, such that fMRI activation related to emotion processing during the emotional -back task, inhibitory control during a stop-signal task (SST), and reward processing during a monetary incentive delay (MID) task does not track memory abilities. Together, these results inform our understanding of individual differences in working memory in childhood and lay the groundwork for characterizing the ways in which they change across adolescence. Working memory is a foundational cognitive ability that changes over time and varies across individuals. Here, we analyze data from over 11,500 9- to 10-year-olds to establish relationships between working memory, other cognitive abilities, and frontoparietal brain activity during a working memory challenge, but not during other cognitive challenges. Our results lay the groundwork for assessing longitudinal changes in working memory and predicting later academic and other real-world outcomes.

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Non-Hispanic Black (NHB) youth are at a higher risk of high-risk behaviors compared to non-Hispanic White (NHW) youth. Some of this racial gap is shown to be due to weaker effects of parental educational attainment on reducing the prevalence of behavioral risk factors such as impulsivity, substance use, aggression, obesity, and poor school performance for NHBs, a pattern called Minorities’ Diminished Returns. These diminishing returns may be due to lower than expected effects of parental education on inhibitory control.

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To compare racial groups for the effect of parental educational attainment on adolescents’ social, emotional, and behavioral problems. In this cross-sectional study, 10,762 youth from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study were included. The independent variable was parental educational attainment. The main outcomes were 1) anxious and depressed mood, 2) withdrawn and depressed affect, 3) somatic complaints, 4) social and interpersonal problems, 5) thought problems, 6) rule-breaking behaviors, 7) attention problems, and 8) violent and aggressive behaviors. These scores were generated based on parent-reported behavioral problems measured using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Race and ethnicity were the moderators. Linear regression was used to analyze the ABCD data. Overall, high parental educational attainment was associated with lower scores across all domains. Race and ethnicity showed statistically significant interactions with parental educational attainment on adolescents’ fewer social, emotional, and behavioral problems (all domains), net of all confounders, indicating smaller tangible gains from their parental educational attainment for Black and Hispanic compared to non-Hispanic White adolescents. The protective effects of parental education against social, emotional, and behavioral problems are systematically diminished for Hispanic and Black than non-Hispanic White adolescents.

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Youth whose parents have alcohol use disorder (AUD) are at higher risk for earlier initiation and greater magnitude of alcohol use, and have a higher likelihood of developing an AUD than their peers without parental history of AUD. This increased risk may be partly attributable to altered development of inhibitory control and related neural circuitry. This study examined neural activation during a motor response inhibition Stop Signal Task (SST) in substance-naïve youth aged 9 to 10 years with and without parental family history of AUD.

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The expanding behavioral repertoire of the developing brain during childhood and adolescence is shaped by complex brain-environment interactions and flavored by unique life experiences. The transition into young adulthood offers opportunities for adaptation and growth but also increased susceptibility to environmental perturbations, such as the characteristics of social relationships, family environment, quality of schools and activities, financial security, urbanization and pollution, drugs, cultural practices, and values, that all act in concert with our genetic architecture and biology. Our multivariate brain-behavior mapping in 7,577 children aged 9 to 11 y across 585 brain imaging phenotypes and 617 cognitive, behavioral, psychosocial, and socioeconomic measures revealed three population modes of brain covariation, which were robust as assessed by cross-validation and permutation testing, taking into account siblings and twins, identified using genetic data. The first mode revealed traces of perinatal complications, including preterm and twin birth, eclampsia and toxemia, shorter period of breastfeeding, and lower cognitive scores, with higher cortical thickness and lower cortical areas and volumes. The second mode reflected a pattern of sociocognitive stratification, linking lower cognitive ability and socioeconomic status to lower cortical thickness, area, and volumes. The third mode captured a pattern related to urbanicity, with particulate matter pollution (PM) inversely related to home value, walkability, and population density, associated with diffusion properties of white matter tracts. These results underscore the importance of a multidimensional and interdisciplinary understanding, integrating social, psychological, and biological sciences, to map the constituents of healthy development and to identify factors that may precede maladjustment and mental illness.

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The network theory suggests that psychopathology may reflect causal relationships between individual symptoms. Several studies have examined cross-sectional relationships between individual symptoms in youth. However, these studies cannot address the directionality of the temporal relationships hypothesized by the network theory. Therefore, we estimated the longitudinal relationships between individual internalizing, externalizing, and attention symptoms in youth.

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Psychosocial acceleration theory suggests that pubertal maturation is accelerated in response to adversity. In addition, suboptimal caregiving accelerates development of the amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex circuit. These findings may be related. Here, we assess whether associations between family environment and measures of the amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex circuit are mediated by pubertal development in more than 2000 9- and 10-year-old children from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (http://dx.doi.org/10.15154/1412097). Using structural equation modeling, demographic, child-reported, and parent-reported data on family dynamics were compiled into a higher level family environment latent variable. Magnetic resonance imaging preprocessing and compilations were performed by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study’s data analysis core. Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) thickness, area, white matter fractional anisotropy, amygdala volume, and cingulo-opercular network-amygdala resting-state functional connectivity were assessed. For ACC cortical thickness and ACC fractional anisotropy, significant indirect effects indicated that a stressful family environment relates to more advanced pubertal stage and more mature brain structure. For cingulo-opercular network-amygdala functional connectivity, results indicated a trend in the expected direction. For ACC area, evidence for quadratic mediation by pubertal stage was found. Sex-stratified analyses suggest stronger results for girls. Despite small effect sizes, structural measures of circuits important for emotional behavior are associated with family environment and show initial evidence of accelerated pubertal development.

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The development of executive function is linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in childhood. Childhood obesity has been associated with changes in brain structure, particularly in PFC, as well as deficits in executive functions. We aimed to determine whether differences in cortical structure mediate the relationship between executive function and childhood obesity. We analyzed MR-derived measures of cortical thickness for 2700 children between the ages of 9 and 11 years, recruited as part of the NIH Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. We related our findings to measures of executive function and body mass index (BMI). In our analysis, increased BMI was associated with significantly reduced mean cortical thickness, as well as specific bilateral reduced cortical thickness in prefrontal cortical regions. This relationship remained after accounting for age, sex, race, parental education, household income, birth-weight, and in-scanner motion. Increased BMI was also associated with lower executive function. Reduced thickness in the rostral medial and superior frontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex partially accounted for reductions in executive function. These results suggest that childhood obesity is associated with compromised executive function. This relationship may be partly explained by BMI-associated reduced cortical thickness in the PFC.

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We sought to document the association between parent’s report and their child’s report of the child’s sexual orientation and associations between this agreement/disagreement and the child’s psychiatric morbidity.

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Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) comorbid with sleep disturbances can produce profound disruption in daily life and negatively impact quality of life of both the child and the family. However, the temporal relationship between ADHD and sleep impairment is unclear, as are underlying common brain mechanisms.

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Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) during childhood are associated with greater risk of developing a psychotic disorder in adulthood, highlighting the importance of identifying neural correlates of childhood PLEs. Furthermore, impairment of cognitive functions, such as working memory and emotion regulation, has also been linked to psychosis risk as well as to disruptions in several brain regions. However, impairments in these domains have also been linked to other disorders, including depression. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to examine whether neural impairments in regions associated with working memory and implicit emotion regulation impairments are specific to PLEs versus depression.

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Childhood suicidal ideation and behaviours are poorly understood. We examined correlates of suicidality in a US population-based sample of children participating in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The ABCD study aims to examine trajectories of mental health from childhood to adulthood and collects information on multiple domains, including mental and physical wellbeing, brain imaging, behavioural and cognitive characteristics, and social and family environment. We sought to identify and rank risk and protective factors for childhood suicidal thoughts and behaviours across these multiple domains and evaluate their association with self-agreement and caregiver agreement in reporting suicidality.

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The Prodromal Questionnaire-Brief Child Version (PQ-BC) has been developed as a tool for identifying psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in school-age children. The current study examined the psychometric properties of the PQ-BC, examined how well the PQ-BC estimates the latent construct of PLEs (θ̂), and began the process of developing a screening form informed by item response theory (IRT). Utilizing the baseline ( = 11,129) sample from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, we examined which PQ-BC items provide the most information and best discriminate individuals experiencing PLEs. Using hierarchical linear models (HLMs), we found that θ̂ scores were significantly associated with several previously identified predictors of psychosis spectrum symptoms (i.e., history of psychosis, internalizing symptoms, cognitive impairments, developmental milestone delays, and resting-state functional connectivity impairments) at baseline and Year 1 ( = 5,532). Using item-level information and discrimination parameters of the PQ-BC from the baseline sample, we created a 7-item screening form. HLMs generally found significant associations between screening form scores for both baseline and Year 1 with the aforementioned predictors. The analyses provide evidence for the validity of a screening form derived from the PQ-BC using IRT-derived parameters. This screening form could prove useful when the full measure is not feasible. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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Parental and social factors have long-term impact on the neurodevelopment of offspring, but tend to highly covary with each other. Thus, it is difficult to parse out which parental and social factor contributes most to neurodevelopmental outcomes. This study aimed to assess clusters of parental and social factors associated with child psychopathology, behavioral problems, and cognition. This study employed the data of 11,875 children (9 to 11 years) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on 39 environmental measures and 30 child behavior and cognitive measures separately to identify clusters of parental and social factors and clusters of child psychopathology, behaviour, and cognition. Regression analysis was used to examine independent effects of each cluster of parental and social factors on child psychopathology, behavioral problems, and cognition. Greater Parent Psychopathology cluster was associated with greater Child Psychopathology cluster. Moreover, greater Socioeconomic Status cluster was associated with greater child General Cognition and Executive Function but less Behavioral Inhibition clusters. Greater Proximal Social Environment and Interaction cluster were associated with less child Impulsive Behavior and Behavioral Inhibition, but greater Behavioral Activation cluster. The environmental clusters related to birth outcomes, maternal tobacco, and drug use were not significantly related to child psychopathology, behavior, and cognition. Our findings suggest that socioeconomic status, parental psychopathology, and social environment and interactions are the strongest risks for behavioral problems and cognitive performance in a general child population. Intervention programs should target modifiable factors within these domains.

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The aim of the study was to investigate associations between sleep disturbances and mental health in adolescents.

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Although suicide is a leading cause of death for children in the United States, and the rate of suicide in childhood has steadily increased, little is known about suicidal ideation and behaviors in children.

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Low sleep duration in adults is correlated with psychiatric and cognitive problems. We performed for the first time a large-scale analysis of sleep duration in children, and how this relates to psychiatric problems including depression, to cognition, and to brain structure. Structural MRI was analyzed in relation to sleep duration, and psychiatric and cognitive measures in 11,067 9-11-year-old children from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, using a linear mixed model, mediation analysis, and structural equation methods in a longitudinal analysis. Dimensional psychopathology (including depression, anxiety, impulsive behavior) in the children was negatively correlated with sleep duration. Dimensional psychopathology in the parents was also correlated with short sleep duration in their children. The brain areas in which higher volume was correlated with longer sleep duration included the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal and temporal cortex, precuneus, and supramarginal gyrus. Longitudinal data analysis showed that the psychiatric problems, especially the depressive problems, were significantly associated with short sleep duration 1 year later. Further, mediation analysis showed that depressive problems significantly mediate the effect of these brain regions on sleep. Higher cognitive scores were associated with higher volume of the prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Public health implications are that psychopathology in the parents should be considered in relation to sleep problems in children. Moreover, we show that brain structure is associated with sleep problems in children, and that this is related to whether or not the child has depressive problems.

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A total of 25.7 million children in the United States are classified as overweight or obese. Obesity is associated with deficits in executive function, which may contribute to poor dietary decision-making. Less is known about the associations between being overweight or obese and brain development.

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White matter tract integrity, measured via fractional anisotropy (FA), may serve as a mediating variable between exercise and depression. To study this, we examined data from 3973 children participating in the ABCD study. Parents of children completed the Sports and Activities questionnaire and the Child Behavior Checklist, and children completed a diffusion MRI scan, providing information about the FA of the parahippocampal cingulum and fornix. Results showed that involvement in sports was associated with reduced depression in boys. The number of activities and sports that a child was involved in was negatively related to FA of the left fornix but was unrelated to FA of other tracts. FA of these white matter tracts was also unrelated to depressive symptoms. This suggests that while white matter tract integrity is associated with exercise, it may not be part of a pathway linking exercise to depression levels in preadolescent boys.

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Neurobiological differences linked to socioemotional and cognitive processing are well documented in youths with disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs), especially youths with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The current study expanded this literature by examining gray matter volume (GMV) differences among youths with DBD with CU traits (DBDCU+), youths with DBD without CU traits (DBD-only), and youths that were typically developing (TD).

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Socioeconomic factors influence brain development and structure, but most studies have overlooked neurotoxic insults that impair development, such as lead exposure. Childhood lead exposure affects cognitive development at the lowest measurable concentrations, but little is known about its impact on brain development during childhood. We examined cross-sectional associations among brain structure, cognition, geocoded measures of the risk of lead exposure and sociodemographic characteristics in 9,712 9- and 10-year-old children. Here we show stronger negative associations of living in high-lead-risk census tracts in children from lower- versus higher-income families. With increasing risk of exposure, children from lower-income families exhibited lower cognitive test scores, smaller cortical volume and smaller cortical surface area. Reducing environmental insults associated with lead-exposure risk might confer greater benefit to children experiencing more environmental adversity, and further understanding of the factors associated with high lead-exposure risk will be critical for improving such outcomes in children.

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Every generation of psychopathologists is confronted with critical issues that, if left unaddressed, impede progress in both science and practice. As just one example, progress in psychiatry was hindered for many years by problems with diagnostic validity. Surmounting these problems required painstaking efforts to operationalize diagnostic criteria and to formulate effective structured interviews. More recently, critical issues facing psychiatry include tackling the so-called replication crisis, and mapping the overwhelming etiological complexity of psychopathology-two interrelated challenges. Many highly cited findings from past decades have failed to replicate, have not been subjected to replication, or have overestimated effect sizes considerably. Such findings apply to virtually all areas of psychiatric research, spanning genetics, central and peripheral biomarkers, and interventions..

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The current study examines the measurement properties and validity of a novel, abbreviated youth version of the UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale that was developed to maintain measurement consistency with the existing adult short form. Specifically, we examined this scale’s (a) factor structure; (b) measurement and structural invariance across four demographic characteristics: gender, ethnicity, household income, and parental education; and (c) correlates using a subset of 4,521 preadolescent (9- and 10-year old) children (53% male) from the baseline wave of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, a large, community-based sample. Our findings supported a correlated 5-factor model, as well as a hierarchical model that recaptured the covariation among these 5 lower-order factors in three higher-order factors. Both of these models are consistent with the commonly observed structure of the UPPS-P among adults. We established measurement invariance across all demographic characteristics. Finally, our UPPS-P scales evidenced good convergent and discriminant validity with a broad swath of theoretically relevant external criteria, including self- and parent-reported personality and psychopathology, as well as lab-based neurocognitive tasks. Our findings indicate that we can assess multidimensional impulsivity in children reliably and validly by means of self-report, allowing assessment of this critical domain at early stages of development. We hope that this measure will facilitate the study of impulsivity in large-scale samples to begin to understand the evolution and long-term consequences of impulsivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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Child depression and anxiety have been associated with electronic media use, but the comorbidity between the two has rarely been accounted for in analyses. We examined both child and parent reports of electronic media use in relation to parent-reported child depression and anxiety. Using survey and interview data collected for 9- to 11-year-olds from the 21-site adolescent brain cognitive development study, we conducted generalized linear mixed models. Our results demonstrated that electronic media use was more strongly associated with depression than anxiety, and that accounting for depression significantly reduced the relationship between electronic media use and anxiety. Different categories of electronic media showed differential relationships to anxiety and depression, with video gaming and video chatting related to anxiety, but video watching related to depression. These findings provide important data to ground theories of the mechanisms that contribute to these associations.

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Head motion represents one of the greatest technical obstacles in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the human brain. Accurate detection of artifacts induced by head motion requires precise estimation of movement. However, head motion estimates may be corrupted by artifacts due to magnetic main field fluctuations generated by body motion. In the current report, we examine head motion estimation in multiband resting state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI) data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study and comparison ‘single-shot’ datasets. We show that respirations contaminate movement estimates in functional MRI and that respiration generates apparent head motion not associated with functional MRI quality reductions. We have developed a novel approach using a band-stop filter that accurately removes these respiratory effects from motion estimates. Subsequently, we demonstrate that utilizing a band-stop filter improves post-processing fMRI data quality. Lastly, we demonstrate the real-time implementation of motion estimate filtering in our FIRMM (Framewise Integrated Real-Time MRI Monitoring) software package.

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Previous research examining the relationship between screen time (ST) and psychological health outcomes have primarily focused on one type of ST (i.e., television), while little research has considered other types of screens (e.g., videos, movies, social media), screen content (e.g., violent video games), or potential mediating variables. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to assess ST types and content and their association with problem behaviors, and to determine whether these relationships were mediated by sleep duration.

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Maladaptive guilt can develop by age three and is associated with severe affective psychopathology in adolescents and adults. Yet, little is known about its prevalence prior to adolescence, or which children are at greatest risk of developing this symptom. This study examined the prevalence and correlates of maladaptive guilt in middle childhood.

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Children of parents with depression are two to three times more likely to develop major depressive disorder than children without parental history; however, subcortical brain volume abnormalities characterizing major depressive disorder risk remain unclear. The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study provides an opportunity to identify subcortical differences associated with parental depressive history.

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Hierarchical dimensional systems of psychopathology promise more informative descriptions for understanding risk and predicting outcome than traditional diagnostic systems, but it is unclear how many major dimensions they should include. We delineated the hierarchy of childhood and adult psychopathology and validated it against clinically relevant measures. Participants were 9987 9- and 10-year-old children and their parents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Factor analyses of items from the Child Behavior Checklist and Adult Self-Report were run to delineate hierarchies of dimensions. We examined the familial aggregation of the psychopathology dimensions, and the ability of different factor solutions to account for risk factors, real-world functioning, cognitive functioning, and physical and mental health service utilization. A hierarchical structure with a general psychopathology (‘p’) factor at the apex and five specific factors (internalizing, somatoform, detachment, neurodevelopmental, and externalizing) emerged in children. Five similar dimensions emerged also in the parents. Child and parent p-factors correlated highly (r = 0.61, p < 0.001), and smaller but significant correlations emerged for convergent dimensions between parents and children after controlling for p-factors (r = 0.09-0.21, p < 0.001). A model with child p-factor alone explained mental health service utilization (R = 0.23, p < 0.001), but up to five dimensions provided incremental validity to account for developmental risk and current functioning in children (R = 0.03-0.19, p < 0.001). In this first investigation comprehensively mapping the psychopathology hierarchy in children and adults, we delineated a hierarchy of higher-order dimensions associated with a range of clinically relevant validators. These findings hold important implications for psychiatric nosology and future research in this sample.

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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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The 21-site Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study provides an unparalleled opportunity to characterize functional brain development via resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) and to quantify relationships between RSFC and behavior. This multi-site data set includes potentially confounding sources of variance, such as differences between data collection sites and/or scanner manufacturers, in addition to those inherent to RSFC (e.g., head motion). The ABCD project provides a framework for characterizing and reproducing RSFC and RSFC-behavior associations, while quantifying the extent to which sources of variability bias RSFC estimates. We quantified RSFC and functional network architecture in 2,188 9-10-year old children from the ABCD study, segregated into demographically-matched discovery (N = 1,166) and replication datasets (N = 1,022). We found RSFC and network architecture to be highly reproducible across children. We did not observe strong effects of site; however, scanner manufacturer effects were large, reproducible, and followed a “short-to-long” association with distance between regions. Accounting for potential confounding variables, we replicated that RSFC between several higher-order networks was related to general cognition. In sum, we provide a framework for how to characterize RSFC-behavior relationships in a rigorous and reproducible manner using the ABCD dataset and other large multi-site projects.

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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Difficulties with higher-order cognitive functions in youth are a potentially important vulnerability factor for the emergence of problematic behaviors and a range of psychopathologies. This study examined 2013 9-10 year olds in the first data release from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development 21-site consortium study in order to identify resting state functional connectivity patterns that predict individual-differences in three domains of higher-order cognitive functions: General Ability, Speed/Flexibility, and Learning/Memory. For General Ability scores in particular, we observed consistent cross-site generalizability, with statistically significant predictions in 14 out of 15 held-out sites. These results survived several tests for robustness including replication in split-half analysis and in a low head motion subsample. We additionally found that connectivity patterns involving task control networks and default mode network were prominently implicated in predicting differences in General Ability across participants. These findings demonstrate that resting state connectivity can be leveraged to produce generalizable markers of neurocognitive functioning. Additionally, they highlight the importance of task control-default mode network interconnections as a major locus of individual differences in cognitive functioning in early adolescence.

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The objective of this study was to examine individual and concurrent associations between meeting the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for Children and Youth (9-11 hours of sleep per night, ≤2 hours of recreational screen time (ST) per day, and at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day) and dimensions of impulsivity.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is an ongoing, nationwide study of the effects of environmental influences on behavioral and brain development in adolescents. The main objective of the study is to recruit and assess over eleven thousand 9-10-year-olds and follow them over the course of 10 years to characterize normative brain and cognitive development, the many factors that influence brain development, and the effects of those factors on mental health and other outcomes. The study employs state-of-the-art multimodal brain imaging, cognitive and clinical assessments, bioassays, and careful assessment of substance use, environment, psychopathological symptoms, and social functioning. The data is a resource of unprecedented scale and depth for studying typical and atypical development. The aim of this manuscript is to describe the baseline neuroimaging processing and subject-level analysis methods used by ABCD. Processing and analyses include modality-specific corrections for distortions and motion, brain segmentation and cortical surface reconstruction derived from structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), analysis of brain microstructure using diffusion MRI (dMRI), task-related analysis of functional MRI (fMRI), and functional connectivity analysis of resting-state fMRI. This manuscript serves as a methodological reference for users of publicly shared neuroimaging data from the ABCD Study.

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Previous research has implicated demographic, psychological, behavioral, and cognitive variables in the onset and maintenance of pediatric overweight/obesity. No adequately-powered study has simultaneously modeled these variables to assess their relative associations with body mass index (BMI; kg/m2) in a nationally representative sample of youth.

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This cohort study uses data from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to assess the association of maternal use of cannabis before and after knowledge of pregnancy with psychosis proneness in children.

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Anhedonia can present in children and predict detrimental clinical outcomes.

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Learning a second language in childhood is inherently advantageous for communication. However, parents, educators and scientists have been interested in determining whether there are additional cognitive advantages. One of the most exciting yet controversial findings about bilinguals is a reported advantage for executive function. That is, several studies suggest that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals on tasks assessing cognitive abilities that are central to the voluntary control of thoughts and behaviours-the so-called ‘executive functions’ (for example, attention, inhibitory control, task switching and resolving conflict). Although a number of small- and large-sample studies have reported a bilingual executive function advantage (see refs. for a review), there have been several failures to replicate these findings, and recent meta-analyses have called into question the reliability of the original empirical claims. Here we show, in a very large, demographically representative sample (n = 4,524) of 9- to 10-year-olds across the United States, that there is little evidence for a bilingual advantage for inhibitory control, attention and task switching, or cognitive flexibility, which are key aspects of executive function. We also replicate previously reported disadvantages in English vocabulary in bilinguals. However, these English vocabulary differences are substantially mitigated when we account for individual differences in socioeconomic status or intelligence. In summary, notwithstanding the inherently positive benefits of learning a second language in childhood, we found little evidence that it engenders additional benefits to executive function development.

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The systemic low-frequency oscillation (sLFO) functional (f)MRI signals extracted from the internal carotid artery (ICA) and the superior sagittal sinus (SSS) are found to have valuable physiological information.

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Purpose The observed sexual dimorphism of velopharyngeal structures among adult populations has not been observed in the young child (4- to 9-year-old) population. The purpose of this study was to examine the age at which sexual dimorphism of velopharyngeal structures become apparent and to examine how growth trends vary between boys and girls. Method Static 3-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging velopharyngeal data were collected among 202 participants ranging from 4 to 21 years of age. Participants were divided into 3 groups based on age, including Group 1: 4-10 years of age, Group 2: 11-17 years of age, and Group 3: 18-21 years of age. Nine velopharyngeal measures were obtained and compared between groups. Results Significant sex effects were evident for levator length ( p = .011), origin to origin ( p = .018), and velopharyngeal ratio ( p = .036) for those in Group 2 (11-17 years of age). Sex effects became increasingly apparent with age, with 7 of 9 variables becoming significantly different between male and female participants in Group 3. Boys, in general, displayed a delayed growth peak in velopharyngeal growth compared to girls. Conclusion Results from this study demonstrate the growth of velopharyngeal anatomy with sexual dimorphism becoming apparent predominantly after 18 years of age. However, velopharyngeal variables displayed variable growth trends with some variables presenting sexual dimorphism at an earlier age compared to other velopharyngeal variables.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a large, longitudinal study of brain development and child health, is uniquely positioned to explore relationships among stress, neurodevelopment, and psychiatric symptomatology, including substance use and addiction. There is much we do not know about how adverse experiences affect the developing brain and cognitive, social, emotional, and academic outcomes. The data collected by the ABCD Study will allow the examination of the relationships among these variables in adolescence, including the effects of stressors (e.g., abuse, neglect, household challenges, parental substance use) on psychological adjustment and other stress responses. A comprehensive protocol that includes physical and mental health, substance use, culture and environment, neurocognitive assessments, biospecimen analyses, and structural and functional neuroimaging will provide opportunities for learning about the impacts of stressors on health and other outcomes in the context of adolescent development. This knowledge could lead to the development of interventions that reduce or even reverse the impacts of stressors.

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Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are critical to developmental, diagnostic, and clinical models of antisocial behaviors (AB). However, assessments of CU traits within large-scale longitudinal and neurobiologically focused investigations remain remarkably sparse. We sought to develop a brief measure of CU traits using items from widely administered instruments that could be linked to neuroimaging, genetic, and environmental data within already existing datasets and future studies.

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Recent studies have found that higher levels of exercise are associated with fewer symptoms of depression among young people. In addition, research suggests that exercise may modify hippocampal volume, a brain region that has been found to show reduced volume in depression. However, it is not clear whether this relationship emerges as early as preadolescence.

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Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) during childhood are associated with greater risk of developing a psychotic disorder (and other mental disorders), highlighting the importance of identifying neural correlates of childhood PLEs. Three major cortical networks-the cingulo-opercular network (CON), default mode network (DMN), and frontoparietal network-are consistently implicated in psychosis and PLEs in adults. However, it is unclear whether variation in functional connectivity is associated with PLEs in school-aged children.

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This study extrapolates data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to estimate the prevalence of eating disorders in US preadolescent children.

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Sexual minority (gay, lesbian, and bisexual) individuals experience elevated mood disorders and suicidality compared to their heterosexual counterparts. However, to date, these sexual orientation disparities have yet to be examined among middle childhood-aged participants.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is poised to be the largest single-cohort long-term longitudinal study of neurodevelopment and child health in the United States. Baseline data on N= 4521 children aged 9-10 were released for public access on November 2, 2018. In this paper we performed principal component analyses of the neurocognitive assessments administered to the baseline sample. The neurocognitive battery included seven measures from the NIH Toolbox as well as five other tasks. We implemented a Bayesian Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis (BPPCA) model that incorporated nesting of subjects within families and within data collection sites. We extracted varimax-rotated component scores from a three-component model and associated these scores with parent-rated Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) internalizing, externalizing, and stress reactivity. We found evidence for three broad components that encompass general cognitive ability, executive function, and learning/memory. These were significantly associated with CBCL scores in a differential manner but with small effect sizes. These findings set the stage for longitudinal analysis of neurocognitive and psychopathological data from the ABCD cohort as they age into the period of maximal adolescent risk-taking.

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This survey study queried children and parents on the child’s sexual orientation and gender identity.

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The adolescent brain undergoes profound structural changes which is influenced by many factors. Screen media activity (SMA; e.g., watching television or videos, playing video games, or using social media) is a common recreational activity in children and adolescents; however, its effect on brain structure is not well understood. A multivariate approach with the first cross-sectional data release from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study was used to test the maturational coupling hypothesis, i.e. the notion that coordinated patterns of structural change related to specific behaviors. Moreover, the utility of this approach was tested by determining the association between these structural correlation networks and psychopathology or cognition. ABCD participants with usable structural imaging and SMA data (N = 4277 of 4524) were subjected to a Group Factor Analysis (GFA) to identify latent variables that relate SMA to cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and gray matter volume. Subject scores from these latent variables were used in generalized linear mixed-effect models to investigate associations between SMA and internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, as well as fluid and crystalized intelligence. Four SMA-related GFAs explained 37% of the variance between SMA and structural brain indices. SMA-related GFAs correlated with brain areas that support homologous functions. Some but not all SMA-related factors corresponded with higher externalizing (Cohen’s d effect size (ES) 0.06-0.1) but not internalizing psychopathology and lower crystalized (ES: 0.08-0.1) and fluid intelligence (ES: 0.04-0.09). Taken together, these findings support the notion of SMA related maturational coupling or structural correlation networks in the brain and provides evidence that individual differences of these networks have mixed consequences for psychopathology and cognitive performance.

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Childhood and adolescence are crucial periods for brain development, and the behaviours during a typical 24 h period contribute to cognitive performance. The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for Children and Youth recommend at least 60 min physical activity per day, 2 h or less recreational screen time per day, and 9-11 h sleep per night in children aged 8-11 years. We investigated the relationship between adherence to these recommendations and global cognition.

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Childhood psychoticlike experiences (PLEs) are associated with greater odds of a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder during adulthood. However, no known, well-validated self-report tools have been designed to measure childhood PLEs.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) will capture a breadth of multi-faceted biobehavioral, environmental, familial, and genetic longitudinal developmental open-access data from over 11,000 9-10 year olds throughout the United States of America (USA) for an envisioned ten-year span. This will subsequently represent the largest study ever attempted with this level of brain phenotypic detail. This study holds the opportunity for exciting advances in the understanding of typical adolescent neurodevelopment, discovery of neurodevelopmental underpinnings of mental illness, as well as the neurodevelopmental influences of (and on) social factors, substance use, and critically – their interaction. This project will certainly take unprecedented steps in informing the nature of adolescence and the developing brain. The scale and open-access features of ABCD also necessarily entail areas for consideration to enhance the integrity of the ABCD study, and protect against potential misuse and misinterpretation of ABCD data. Ultimately, with the open-source data, all scientists in the broader community have as much responsibility as the investigators within the Consortium to treat these data with care. It will be fascinating to see what dynamic data these paths generate. ABCD is poised to exemplify how large-scale longitudinal developmental neuroscientific studies can be designed and efficiently conducted.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a large, longitudinal study of brain development and child health, relies on the engagement of communities, educators, and families to ensure its success. To that end, community and partner relationships, development of targeted messages and materials for specific audiences (educators, families, youth, scientists), and continued and consistent outreach must be an integral part of the Consortium activities. The ABCD Consortium has made these efforts a priority and developed a framework to raise awareness about the study and promote sustained broad-base support from diverse stakeholders.

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The ABCD study is a new and ongoing project of very substantial size and scale involving 21 data acquisition sites. It aims to recruit 11,500 children and follow them for ten years with extensive assessments at multiple timepoints. To deliver on its potential to adequately describe adolescent development, it is essential that it adopt recruitment procedures that are efficient and effective and will yield a sample that reflects the nation’s diversity in an epidemiologically informed manner. Here, we describe the sampling plans and recruitment procedures of this study. Participants are largely recruited through the school systems with school selection informed by gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and urbanicity. Procedures for school selection designed to mitigate selection biases, dynamic monitoring of the accumulating sample to correct deviations from recruitment targets, and a description of the recruitment procedures designed to foster a collaborative attitude between the researchers, the schools and the local communities, are provided.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is designed to be the largest study of brain development and child health in the United States, performing comprehensive assessments of 11,500 children repeatedly for 10 years. An endeavor of this magnitude requires an organized framework of governance and communication that promotes collaborative decision-making and dissemination of information. The ABCD consortium structure, built upon the Matrix Management approach of organizational theory, facilitates the integration of input from all institutions, numerous internal workgroups and committees, federal partners, and external advisory groups to make use of a broad range of expertise to ensure the study’s success.

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To guide recruitment, the ABCD Study requires a method for identifying children at high risk for early-onset substance use that may be utilized during the recruitment process. This study was undertaken to inform the development of a brief screen for identifying youths’ risk of early-onset substance use and other adverse outcomes. To be acceptable by participants in this context, consideration of potential items was limited to child characteristics previously determined to be potentially pertinent and parental cigarette smoking. To focus the analyses on a single target substance use outcome pertinent to the stated goals of the ABCD Study, early-onset marijuana use was selected. Utilizing data collected prior to the initiation of the ABCD Study, four longitudinal data sets were used in nine secondary data analyses to test, replicate and validate a brief screening assessment for boys and girls to identify those at risk for early-onset marijuana use by ages 14-15. The combination of child externalizing problems reported by the parent (4 items: destroys things belonging to his/her family or others; disobedience at school; lying or cheating; steals outside the home) and parent smoking (1 item) proved to be the optimal screen. This was largely replicated across the four data sets. Indicators of predictive efficiency were modest in magnitude and statistically significant in 8 out of the 9 analyses. The results informed the screen’s optimal threshold for identifying children at risk for early-onset marijuana use. The addition of child internalizing problems did not improve these predictions. Further analyses showed the predictive utility of the screen for several other substance use outcomes at ages 15 to 18, including alcohol and nicotine use. The results support the use of a short screening assessment to identify youth at risk for early-onset substance use in the ABCD Study and other research.

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Mobile and wearable technologies and novel methods of data collection are innovating health-related research. These technologies and methods allow for multi-system level capture of data across environmental, physiological, behavioral, and psychological domains. In the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, there is great potential for harnessing the acceptability, accessibility, and functionality of mobile and social technologies for in-vivo data capture to precisely measure factors, and interactions between factors, that contribute to childhood and adolescent neurodevelopment and psychosocial and health outcomes. Here we discuss advances in mobile and wearable technologies and methods of analysis of geospatial, ecologic, social network and behavioral data. Incorporating these technologies into the ABCD study will allow for interdisciplinary research on the effects of place, social interactions, environment, and substance use on health and developmental outcomes in children and adolescents.

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Neurodevelopmental maturation takes place in a social environment in addition to a neurobiological one. Characterization of social environmental factors that influence this process is therefore an essential component in developing an accurate model of adolescent brain and neurocognitive development, as well as susceptibility to change with the use of marijuana and other drugs. The creation of the Culture and Environment (CE) measurement component of the ABCD protocol was guided by this understanding. Three areas were identified by the CE Work Group as central to this process: influences relating to CE Group membership, influences created by the proximal social environment, influences stemming from social interactions. Eleven measures assess these influences, and by time of publication, will have been administered to well over 7,000 9-10 year-old children and one of their parents. Our report presents baseline data on psychometric characteristics (mean, standard deviation, range, skewness, coefficient alpha) of all measures within the battery. Effectiveness of the battery in differentiating 9-10 year olds who were classified as at higher and lower risk for marijuana use in adolescence was also evaluated. Psychometric characteristics on all measures were good to excellent; higher vs. lower risk contrasts were significant in areas where risk differentiation would be anticipated.

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Biospecimen collection in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study – of hair samples, shed deciduous (baby) teeth, and body fluids – will serve dual functions of screening for study eligibility, and providing measures of biological processes thought to predict or correlate with key study outcomes on brain and cognitive development. Biosamples are being collected annually to screen for recency of drug use prior to the neuroimaging or cognitive testing visit, and to store for the following future studies: (1) on the effects of exposure to illicit and recreational drugs (including alcohol and nicotine); (2) of pubertal hormones on brain and cognitive developmental trajectories; (3) on the contribution of genomics and epigenomics to child and adolescent development and behavioral outcomes; and (4) with pre- and post-natal exposure to environmental neurotoxicants and drugs of abuse measured from novel tooth analyses. The present manuscript describes the rationales for inclusion and selection of the specific biospecimens, methodological considerations for each measure, future plans for assessment of biospecimens during follow-up visits, and preliminary ABCD data to illustrate methodological considerations.

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The ABCD study is recruiting and following the brain development and health of over 10,000 9-10 year olds through adolescence. The imaging component of the study was developed by the ABCD Data Analysis and Informatics Center (DAIC) and the ABCD Imaging Acquisition Workgroup. Imaging methods and assessments were selected, optimized and harmonized across all 21 sites to measure brain structure and function relevant to adolescent development and addiction. This article provides an overview of the imaging procedures of the ABCD study, the basis for their selection and preliminary quality assurance and results that provide evidence for the feasibility and age-appropriateness of procedures and generalizability of findings to the existent literature.

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This special section focuses on research that utilizes neuroimaging methods to examine the impact of social relationships and socioemotional development on adolescent brain function. Studies include novel neuroimaging methods that further our understanding of adolescent brain development. This special section has a particular focus on how study findings add to our understanding of risk and resilience. In this introduction to the special section, we discuss the role of neuroimaging in developmental science and provide a brief review of neuroimaging methods. We present key themes that are covered in the special section articles including: (1) emerging methods in developmental neuroscience, (2) emotion-cognition interaction, and (3) the role of social relationships in brain function. We conclude our introduction with future directions for integrating developmental neuroscience into the study of adolescence, and highlight key points from the special section’s commentaries which include information on the landmark Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

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Adolescence is characterized by numerous social, hormonal and physical changes, as well as a marked increase in risk-taking behaviors. Dual systems models attribute adolescent risk-taking to tensions between developing capacities for cognitive control and motivational strivings, which may peak at this time. A comprehensive understanding of neurocognitive development during the adolescent period is necessary to permit the distinction between premorbid vulnerabilities and consequences of behaviors such as substance use. Thus, the prospective assessment of cognitive development is fundamental to the aims of the newly launched Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Consortium. This paper details the rationale for ABC’lected measures of neurocognition, presents preliminary descriptive data on an initial sample of 2299 participants, and provides a context for how this large-scale project can inform our understanding of adolescent neurodevelopment.

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One of the objectives of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (https://abcdstudy.org/) is to establish a national longitudinal cohort of 9 and 10 year olds that will be followed for 10 years in order to prospectively study the risk and protective factors influencing substance use and its consequences, examine the impact of substance use on neurocognitive, health and psychosocial outcomes, and to understand the relationship between substance use and psychopathology. This article provides an overview of the ABCD Study Substance Use Workgroup, provides the goals for the workgroup, rationale for the substance use battery, and includes details on the substance use module methods and measurement tools used during baseline, 6-month and 1-year follow-up assessment time-points. Prospective, longitudinal assessment of these substance use domains over a period of ten years in a nationwide sample of youth presents an unprecedented opportunity to further understand the timing and interactive relationships between substance use and neurocognitive, health, and psychopathology outcomes in youth living in the United States.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a longitudinal, observational study of over 10,000 youth recruited at 21 sites throughout the United States. Comprehensive biennial assessments and more limited interim assessments measure health, mental health, neurocognition, family, cultural and environmental variables, substance use, genetic and other biomarkers, and structural and functional brain development. Within this Special Issue, readers will find much information about the rationale and objectives of the study, the broad ranging assessment protocols and new as well as traditional methodologies applied at baseline, the recruitment and retention strategies, and the anticipated final composition of the cohort. Information is also provided about how the study is coordinated and conducted, how decisions are made, how data quality is monitored, and how ethical standards are protected. In this introduction we will focus instead on the position of the ABCD Study in the changing landscape of biomedical research.

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Retention efforts are critical to maintain relationships with research participants over time. This is especially important for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, where families are asked to stay engaged with the study throughout the course of 10 years. This high-degree of involvement is essential to longitudinally track child and adolescent development. At a minimum, we will connect with families every 6 months by telephone, and every year in person, with closer contact with the youth directly as they transition into adolescence. Differential retention, when related to non-random issues pertaining to demographic or risk features, can negatively impact the generalizability of study outcomes. Thus, to ensure high rates of retention for all participants, the ABCD study employs a number of efforts to support youth and families. This overview details the framework and concrete steps for retention.

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The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study incorporates a comprehensive range of measures assessing predictors and outcomes related to both mental and physical health across childhood and adolescence. The workgroup developed a battery that would assess a comprehensive range of domains that address study aims while minimizing participant and family burden. We review the major considerations that went into deciding what constructs to cover in the demographics, physical health and mental health domains, as well as the process of selecting measures, piloting and refining the originally proposed battery. We present a description of the baseline battery, as well as the six-month interim assessments and the one-year follow-up assessments. This battery includes assessments from the perspectives of both the parent and the target youth, as well as teacher reports. This battery will provide a foundational baseline assessment of the youth’s current function so as to permit characterization of stability and change in key domains over time. The findings from this battery will also be utilized to identify both resilience markers that predict healthy development and risk factors for later adverse outcomes in physical health, mental health, and substance use and abuse.

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Adolescence is a time of dramatic changes in brain structure and function, and the adolescent brain is highly susceptible to being altered by experiences like substance use. However, there is much we have yet to learn about how these experiences influence brain development, how they promote or interfere with later health outcomes, or even what healthy brain development looks like. A large longitudinal study beginning in early adolescence could help us understand the normal variability in adolescent brain and cognitive development and tease apart the many factors that influence it. Recent advances in neuroimaging, informatics, and genetics technologies have made it feasible to conduct a study of sufficient size and scope to answer many outstanding questions. At the same time, several Institutes across the NIH recognized the value of collaborating in such a project because of its ability to address the role of biological, environmental, and behavioral factors like gender, pubertal hormones, sports participation, and social/economic disparities on brain development as well as their association with the emergence and progression of substance use and mental illness including suicide risk. Thus, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study was created to answer the most pressing public health questions of our day.

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The ABCD twin study will elucidate the genetic and environmental contributions to a wide range of mental and physical health outcomes in children, including substance use, brain and behavioral development, and their interrelationship. Comparisons within and between monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs, further powered by multiple assessments, provide information about genetic and environmental contributions to developmental associations, and enable stronger tests of causal hypotheses, than do comparisons involving unrelated children. Thus a sub-study of 800 pairs of same-sex twins was embedded within the overall Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) design. The ABCD Twin Hub comprises four leading centers for twin research in Minnesota, Colorado, Virginia, and Missouri. Each site is enrolling 200 twin pairs, as well as singletons. The twins are recruited from registries of all twin births in each State during 2006-2008. Singletons at each site are recruited following the same school-based procedures as the rest of the ABCD study. This paper describes the background and rationale for the ABCD twin study, the ascertainment of twin pairs and implementation strategy at each site, and the details of the proposed analytic strategies to quantify genetic and environmental influences and test hypotheses critical to the aims of the ABCD study.

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Observational neuroimaging studies with children and adolescents may identify neurological anomalies and other clinically relevant findings. Planning for the management of this information involves ethical considerations that may influence informed consent, confidentiality, and communication with participants about assessment results. Biomedical ethics principles include respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Each project presents unique challenges. The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study (ABCD) collaborators have systematically developed recommendations with written guidelines for identifying and responding to potential risks that adhere to biomedical ethics principles. To illustrate, we will review the ABCD approach to three areas: (1) hazardous substance use; (2) neurological anomalies; and (3) imminent potential for self-harm or harm to others. Each ABCD site is responsible for implementing procedures consistent with these guidelines in accordance with their Institutional Review Board approved protocols, state regulations, and local resources. To assure that each site has related plans and resources in place, site emergency procedures manuals have been developed, documented and reviewed for adherence to ABCD guidelines. This article will describe the principles and process used to develop these ABCD bioethics and medical oversight guidelines, the concerns and options considered, and the resulting approaches advised to sites.

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Substance use disorders (SUD) can be considered developmental disorders in light of their frequent origins in substance initiation during adolescence. Cross-sectional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of adolescent substance users or adolescents with SUD have indicated aberrations in brain structures or circuits implicated in motivation, self-control, and mood-regulation. However, attributing these differences to the neurotoxicological effects of chronic substance use has been problematic in that these circuits are also aberrant in at-risk children, such as those with prenatal substance exposure, externalizing disorders (such as conduct disorder), or prodromal internalizing disorders such as depression. To better isolate the effects of substance exposure on the adolescent brain, the newly-launched Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will follow the neurodevelopmental trajectories of over 11,000 American 9/10-year-olds for 10 years, into emerging adulthood. This study will provide a rich open-access dataset on longitudinal interactions of neurodevelopment, environmental exposures, and childhood psychopathology that confer addiction risk. The ABCD twin study will further clarify genetic versus experiential influences (e.g., substance use) on neurodevelopmental and psychosocial outcomes. Neurocircuitry thought to regulate mood and behavior has been directly normalized by administration of psychoactive medications and by cognitive therapies in adults. Because of this, we contend that ABCD project data will be a crucial resource for prevention and treatment of SUD in adolescence because its cutting-edge neuroimaging and childhood assessments hold potential for discovery of additional targetable brain differences earlier in development that are prognostic of (or aberrant in) SUD. The ABCD sample size will also have the power to illuminate how sex differences, environmental interactions and other individual differences interact with neurodevelopment to inform treatment in different groups of adolescents.

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