The first wave of data Penn State's HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study is now available to researchers interested in addressing a wide-range of questions, including how environments and substances impact infant and child development.

In 2021, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded Penn State approximately $5.8 million over five years to become one of 27 recruitment sites for the HBCD study. At Penn State, HBCD is co-led by Koraly Pérez-Edgar, the McCourtney Professor of Child Studies, and Aleksandra Zgierska, the Jeanne L. and Thomas L. Leaman, MD, Endowed Professor of Family and Community Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine. 

“The effects of prenatal experiences, home environment and prenatal substance use on child health and brain development are not deeply understood, even though pregnancy and early childhood are incredibly important periods of growth,” said Pérez-Edgar, who is also an associate director at Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute. “Findings from this cohort study will provide a template for understanding infant and child development and help untangle the impact of exposures to substances and childhood environments during pregnancy on developmental trajectories.”

Researchers at Penn State’s University Park and Hershey campuses have been enrolling people in the second and third trimester of pregnancy since 2023. The research team aims to enroll a total of 300 families, contributing to a larger national cohort of over 7,200 families. The researchers are following these participants and their children from before birth through early childhood. The data now available — gathered from 1,400 families during pregnancy and infants from newborn through 9 months of age— includes family history as well as measurements of brain development, physical growth, and social, emotional, and cognitive development.

According to Pérez-Edgar, one of the things that makes this data set so valuable is its large scale in both sample size and multiple geographic locations. 

“This data set includes both behavioral and biological data, allowing researchers to ask many questions, examining both large and subtle developmental mechanisms,” Pérez-Edgar said. “Many other large-scale studies that rely on data from questionnaires are more limited, because they only contain data from the questions asked and do not include biological specimens or behavioral observations.”

Additionally, the researchers said, it would be too expensive and prohibitive to replicate the same data from a traditional single site study. 

“Because the Penn State study site encompasses multiple campuses, we can recruit families from rural, semi-rural and urban communities across a large geographic area,” Zgierska said. “Rural pregnant women, in particular, are largely underserved.”

The first data release includes information from visits through June 30, 2024. While researchers will have to wait for data releases from subsequent years, Pérez-Edgar said it will be worth the wait. 

“These incremental releases will allow researchers access to the data at hand while recruitment of families and research visits are still taking place,” Pérez-Edgar said.

The data is available to all researchers in the U.S. and abroad to help answer their research questions. 

Another related dataset is also available for researchers exploring questions related to childhood development. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study has also been collecting data in Pennsylvania as one of 21 research sites across the country. Starting in 2015, the ABCD Study recruited almost 12,000 children beginning at ages 9 to 10 and is continuing to track their biological and behavioral development through adolescence into young adulthood.

“For researchers, there are many overlaps in measures and construct of interests between the two datasets,” Pérez-Edgar said. “Fortunately, the ABCD data releases have migrated to the same data platform that HBCD uses and will be subject to a new, single umbrella data yse contract for both cohorts, making the data even more accessible to researchers.”

Interested researchers can apply to access the data, through the NIH’s researcher authentication service. 

Other Penn State co-investigators on the HBCD project are Danielle Downs, professor of kinesiology and obstetrics and gynecology; Rina Eiden, professor of psychology; Jenae Neiderhiser, distinguished professor of psychology and human development and family studies; Michele Diaz, professor of psychology and linguistics; Emma Rose, associate teaching professor of psychology; Sangam Kanekar, professor of diagnostic radiology, neuroradiology and radiology; Dara Babinski, clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry; Sarah Ramirez, assistant professor of family and community medicine, Jaimie Maines, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology; Tammy Corr, neonatologist and associate professor of pediatrics; and Wen-Jan Tuan, assistant professor of family and community medicine. 

HBCD is funded by through the NIH HEAL Initiative and numerous institutes and offices at NIH, and it is led by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Penn State’s work is supported by NIH and various Penn State units.

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