Mount Sinai Begins Recruitment for Landmark Study of Adolescent Brain Development
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has begun recruitment for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. The landmark study by the National Institutes of Health will follow the biological and behavioral development of approximately 10,000 children beginning at ages 9¬¬-10 through adolescence into early adulthood. Recruitment will be done over a two-year period through partnerships with public and private schools near 19 research sites across the country as well as through twin registries.
Adolescence is a time of extraordinary physical, emotional, and intellectual growth as well as a changing social environment full of new challenges and opportunities that help shape a young person’s adult identity, health, and well-being. There is much to learn about how varied adolescent experiences (such as participation in extracurricular activities; playing video games; sleep habits; head injuries from sports; and experimentation with alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or other substances) affect development and vice versa. This is particularly true in our rapidly changing world, which is now dominated by social media and other forms of communication in which adolescents readily engage.
During the course of the next decade, Mount Sinai researchers will use advanced brain imaging, interviews, and behavioral testing to determine how childhood experiences interact with each other and with a child’s changing biology to affect brain development and, ultimately, social, behavioral, academic, health, and other outcomes.
“The standardized, multi-system big-data framework approach that we will use to study a large number of young study participants will yield valuable insight about how a variety of biological events and environmental exposures affect brain development,” says Rita Goldstein, PhD, Chief of the Neuropsychoimaging of Addiction and Related Conditions (NARC) research group and the Brain Imaging Center (BIC) and a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and leader of the study at Mount Sinai. “Integrative multi-modal neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies that we will use in this study have not been conducted at this scale before and so this work is both exciting and crucially important.”
Dr. Goldstein will work with collaborators from Yale University to collect mental and physical health information, including data from high-resolution brain scans and genetic material. They will also collect information about sleep patterns, diet and exercise, social media use and other environmental factors. Together, the Mount Sinai and Yale researchers will recruit more than 1,000 children, constituting a major contribution to the study total.
In addition to creating a comprehensive informational database and revealing the biological and environmental building blocks that best contribute to successful and resilient young adults, the ABCD study promises to inform future educational strategies, child development innovations, research priorities, more effective public health interventions, and science-based policy decisions.
For more information about the ABCD Study, please visit: http://addictionresearch.nih.gov/adolescent-brain-cognitive-development-study
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek and No. 5 on the magazine’s World’s Best Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.
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