Funded Projects

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Alabama will enroll pregnant women during their second trimester and follow their infants through a comprehensive longitudinal study. This program will follow 300 mother-infant pairs to understand how early life exposure to drugs and other environmental factors affects developmental trajectories. In addition, this program will determine how genetic and biological factors interact with environmental factors to influence neurodevelopment. This study will take place at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, recruiting participants from mainly rural populations with low access to obstetric/gynecological (OB/GYN) care and high rates of substance use.

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) will establish a normative model of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life. All sites in the HBCD-NC will carry out a common research protocol and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive research dataset to the scientific community. The HBCD-NC will collect neural, behavioral, physiological, and psychological measures, as well as biospecimens, to characterize neurodevelopmental trajectories. Most participants will be recruited in the second trimester of pregnancy, with a smaller subset recruited at birth, and followed for the first 10 years of life. This study will take place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where researchers will have access to a diverse group of people, including women with criminal justice involvement.

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) will establish a normative model of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life. All sites in the HBCD-NC will carry out a common research protocol and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive research dataset to the scientific community. The HBCD-NC will collect neural, behavioral, physiological, and psychological measures, as well as biospecimens, to characterize neurodevelopmental trajectories. Most participants will be recruited in the second trimester of pregnancy, with a smaller subset recruited at birth, and followed for the first 10 years of life. This study will take place at Oregon Health and Science University, giving researchers access to people in a region with very high rates of opioid misuse.

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) Administrative Core (HCAC) will coordinate efforts across all sites in the HBCD-NC consortium to ensure that the consortium meets its primary objective to establish a normative model of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life. The HBCD-NC will collect neural, behavioral, physiological, and psychological measures, as well as biospecimens, to characterize neurodevelopmental trajectories. The HCAC will oversee study design and monitor the progress of each site’s ability to carry out a common research protocol and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive research dataset to the scientific community. This administrative core is located at the University of California, San Diego.

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) will establish a normative model of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life. All sites in the HBCD-NC will carry out a common research protocol and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive research dataset to the scientific community. The HBCD-NC will collect neural, behavioral, physiological, and psychological measures, as well as biospecimens, to characterize neurodevelopmental trajectories. Most participants will be recruited in the second trimester of pregnancy, with a smaller subset recruited at birth, and followed for the first 10 years of life. The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center study site is in Los Angeles where marijuana is legal and methamphetamine use is prevalent, enabling researchers to recruit participants from high-risk populations.

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) will establish a normative model of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life. All sites in the HBCD-NC will carry out a common research protocol and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive and well curated research dataset to the scientific community at large. The HBCD-NC will collect neural, behavioral, physiological, and psychological measures, as well as biospecimens, to characterize neurodevelopmental trajectories. Most participants will be recruited in the second trimester of pregnancy, with a smaller subset recruited at birth, and followed for the first 10 years of life. The Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles study site will enroll participants from across the Greater Los Angeles region, where the prevalence of legal and illegal non-opioid drug use is high, enabling researchers to recruit from diverse, high-risk populations.

A more than 5-fold increase in the incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome has been reported since 2000. Preliminary studies show that prenatal opioid exposure is associated with increased risk of impaired neurodevelopment. Five institutions (Duke University, Arkansas Children’s Research Institute, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) have formed a consortium to develop strategies for the Phase II HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study. Research teams will develop instruments and strategies (recruitment/retention protocols, assessment batteries, and novel tools); conduct pilot studies (fetal and postnatal imaging, advanced imaging harmonization and quality control, assessment administration, biosampling) to evaluate instruments; and analyze available data, including imaging, behavioral, cognitive, and maternal data from studies on early brain development, to guide the Phase II study design. Upon completion, the consortium aims to conduct the Phase II study.

This project will support consortium hypothesis generation in Phase II in order to disentangle how complex environmental factors impact brain development and function — from fetal period through the first decade — to shape cognitive, social, and emotional development. The project will develop the strategies to recruit and retain a racially and ethnically diverse sample of pregnant women (and their fetuses), who are oversampled for adverse environmental risk factors and exposure to substances of abuse; develop the strategies for managing potential legal and ethical challenges to ensure that the mother–child dyads have access to legal, social, and psychological support services as needed; and determine the optimal study protocol for the planned, phase II study — balancing the need for high quality, longitudinal data collection with the need to minimize burden on the mother–child dyads.

Prevalence rates of opioids misuse in Los Angeles County (LA) are particularly high among individuals of childbearing age and in already-vulnerable populations including African American females. These data highlight a pressing need for a systematic study of the effects of prenatal drug exposures (PDE) in the unique sociodemographic LA County area. In this project, researchers aim to establish the feasibility for the large-scale Phase II HEALthy BCD study in the Los Angeles area with three specific aims: (1) build a broad interdisciplinary team of investigators capable of a multi-faceted study of brain and behavioral development in both typically developing and at-risk infants/children; (2) establish a set of highly executable recruitment and retention strategies for both drug-free and drug-exposed infants/children; and (3)establish comprehensive study protocols that will help address the three key research objectives of the Phase II study.

Researchers will expand a recently initiated pregnancy cohort at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) called ORCHARD (ORigins of Child Health And Resilience in Development) to create a Baltimore HEALthy BCD site, named HEALthy ORCHARD. The research team will convene investigators at JHU and the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI), and community partners across nine work groups to: (1) develop protocols for recruitment and retention of pregnant mothers and children with enriched sampling of pregnant women who are using substances; (2) establish community, medical, and government partnerships necessary to implement recruitment, retention, data collection and community benefits; (3) characterize the critical ethical and legal challenges raised during study design, in pilot studies, and by prospective participants, and propose solutions where possible and additional research where necessary; (4) develop protocols for longitudinal data collection across pregnancy and childhood; and (5) contribute to multi-site protocol development and nationally relevant principles regarding ethical and legal issues.

Despite increased efforts to understand the neurodevelopmental sequelae of in utero opioid and other substance exposure on long-term behavioral, cognitive, and societal outcomes, important questions remain, specifically, 1) How is brain growth disrupted by fetal substance and related pre- and post-natal exposures? and 2) How are these disrupted growth patterns causally related to later cognitive and behavioral outcomes? This project seeks to formulate an approach to addressing these key questions and decipher the individual and cumulative effect of these intertwined pre- and post-natal exposures on child neurodevelopment. First, researchers will address the legal, ethical, and mother-child care and support concerns implicit in this study. Next, they will integrate across our areas of neuroimaging expertise to develop, implement, and harmonize a multi-modal MRI and EEG protocol to assess maturing brain structure, function, and connectivity. Finally, researchers will develop and test advanced statistical approaches to model and analyze this multidimensional and longitudinal data.

The Planning for the HEALthy Early Development Study will contribute to the design and recommended protocol for a future large-scale, multi-site research study to prospectively examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development of children beginning prenatally through ages 9–10 and to determine the impact of maternal pre- and postnatal substance use on short- and long-term development of children. The planning study will link investigators across 6 research sites who have complementary experience and expertise in the areas that are essential to designing the study. Planning activities will be accomplished using a coordinated set of 10 working groups. By the end of the planning phase, the 6 consortium sites will have produced and tested a recommended protocol for the future multi-site study and will have established feasibility of carrying out the study protocol at each of the 6 linked sites.

The Planning for the HEALthy Early Development Study will contribute to the design and recommended protocol for a future large-scale, multi-site research study to prospectively examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development of children beginning prenatally through ages 9–10 and to determine the impact of maternal pre- and postnatal substance use on short- and long-term development of children. The planning study will link investigators across 6 research sites who have complementary experience and expertise in the areas that are essential to designing the study. Planning activities will be accomplished using a coordinated set of 10 working groups. By the end of the planning phase, the 6 consortium sites will have produced and tested a recommended protocol for the future multi-site study and will have established feasibility of carrying out the study protocol at each of the 6 linked sites.