Parents Typically Track Children’s Growth. UMD Research Could One Day Let Them Follow Brain Development.

At a typical pediatric visit, parents and clinicians examine where a child falls on growth charts that compare their height and weight to national averages.

Now, a team of University of Maryland researchers and collaborators are working to create a future where pediatricians and other medical professionals and researchers can also track and share information about something just as important as physical growth: a child’s brain development.

Professor Tracy Riggins of the Department of Psychology, along with Professors Brenda Jones Harden and Nathan Fox of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, are working with the National Institutes of Health to continue building, and now sharing, the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub. Open for the first time to researchers worldwide, the NIH-funded project provides access to rich, longitudinal brain, behavior and genomic data gathered from two ongoing studies: the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, and the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study.

Once scholars have access to the NBDC Data Hub, they could potentially use it to study a nearly unlimited range of topics related to children’s brains and behaviors, from autism spectrum disorder to mental health conditions to memory and language development.

“This dataset is unprecedented. The scientific community does not yet have anything like this in terms of the growth chart of the brain. We are gathering and sharing knowledge about the typically developing brain; that is one of the major goals of this huge initiative,” Riggins said.

The two studies that the new data hub is based on represent a vast storehouse of developmental data that stretches all the way through childhood.

“With the combination of the HBCD study—which begins in pregnancy and goes to age 8, and the ABCD, which starts at 8 and goes through adolescence—researchers will have an extraordinary set of data about brain and behavioral development,” Fox said.

HBCD’s final sample will include about 7,000 parent and child pairs. The brain scans and other information from current and future participants allow researchers to observe the full range of brain development in individuals through the crucial years from birth through the early teens.

“A major goal of the study is to examine the impact of exposure to various aspects of the environment—including prenatal substance use, environmental pollutants, and parental stress—on children’s brains and behaviors. We’re also paying attention to a range of demographic factors, from race and ethnicity to where a family lives to income,” Jones Harden said.

Ultimately, the data do not belong to any one researcher or university; NBDC is an open resource that Jones Harden said could potentially inform federal and state policies about children and families, from services to address children’s developmental needs to programs for families who experience adversities such as addiction.

The dataset shows how wise use of federal funding can benefit researchers broadly, who in turn work to create a better world for all, the UMD researchers say.

“No one researcher or university could collect data like this, in such a comprehensive way, and distribute it in such a fair manner in which people can use this data to address so many different questions about the brain and the body,” Riggins said. “For example, I study a very small part of the brain, the hippocampus. But the same information I will use for my work will benefit researchers in other places who study different parts of the brain, different brain functions. We can all use the same dataset, but ask different questions with it.”

In order to keep this innovative project to continue growing, Riggins said she and her colleagues are working to recruit more participants. The study currently includes participants who speak primarily English and those who speak primarily Spanish.

The UMD team looks for ways to help support participating families. That can range from providing items like diapers and clothing through a “resource closet,” to putting up families in hotels for a night to facilitate MRI scans done when a child is sleeping, to helping an expecting mother secure care for her older children when she goes into labor.

As more and more families participate, the researchers will be able to share deeper and more voluminous data with their colleagues from around the world.

“The potential for what researchers could learn about the human brain, and human behavior, from this project—it’s limitless,” Riggins said.

To learn more about the study, families can visit hbcdstudy.org. There, they can watch a video about the “HBCD experience,” and potentially sign up to participate via hbcdstudy.org/participate-in-hbcd-study.