New Dataset Made Available from Study of Adolescent Brain Development

In February of 2018 the US National Institute of Health (NIH) released the first dataset from an "unprecedented study of adolescent brain development", the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

The study has, to date, involved more than 7,500 youth and their families. Approximately 30 terabytes of data will be made available to scientists globally which according to the NIH press release equates to a voluminous amount of information about three times the size of the Library of Congress collection.

Researchers exploring the many factors that influence brain, cognitive, social, and emotional development will have access to  

"high-quality baseline data on a large sample of 9-and-10-year-old children, including basic participant demographics, assessments of physical and mental health, substance use, culture and environment, neurocognition, tabulated structural and functional neuroimaging data, and minimally processed brain images, as well as biological data such as pubertal hormone analyses."

This will allow researchers to explore topics such as the link between substance use and mental health, how substance use might affect learning and development and neural pathways associated with the development of mental illness. 

For those who obtain a NIMH Data Archive account the rich data will be available through National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Data Archive. The ABCD study is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse among other key research institutions.