Prospective associations between Sleep, Sensation-Seeking and Mature Screen Usage in Early Adolescents: Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

Study Objectives: Early exposure to mature content is linked to high-risk behaviors. This study aims to prospectively investigate how sleep and sensation-seeking behaviors influence the consumption of mature video games and R-rated movies in early adolescents. A secondary analysis examines the bidirectional relationships between sleep patterns and mature screen usage.

Variation in moment-to-moment brain state engagement changes across development and contributes to individual differences in executive function.

Neural variability, or variation in brain signals, facilitates dynamic brain responses to ongoing demands. This flexibility is important during development from childhood to young adulthood, a period characterized by rapid changes in experience. However, little is known about how variability in the engagement of recurring brain states changes during development.

Brain Networks and Adolescent Alcohol Use.

Importance: Alcohol misuse in adolescence is a leading cause of disability and mortality in youth and is associated with higher risk for alcohol use disorder. Brain mechanisms underlying risk of alcohol misuse may inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Objective: To identify neuromarkers of alcohol misuse using a data-driven approach, with specific consideration of neurodevelopmental sex differences.

Association between vmPFC gray matter volume and smoking initiation in adolescents.

Smoking of cigarettes among young adolescents is a pressing public health issue. However, the neural mechanisms underlying smoking initiation and sustenance during adolescence, especially the potential causal interactions between altered brain development and smoking behaviour, remain elusive. Here, using large longitudinal adolescence imaging genetic cohorts, we identify associations between left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) gray matter volume (GMV) and subsequent self-reported smoking initiation, and between right vmPFC GMV and the maintenance of smoking behaviour.

Associations Between Gender Nonconformity, School Environments, Family Conflict, and Emotional and Behavioral Health Among Children Ages 10-11.

Purpose: In youth, gender nonconformity (GNC; gender expression that differs from stereotypes based on assigned sex at birth) is associated with a higher likelihood of peer and caregiver victimization and rejection. However, few studies have examined the relationship between GNC, overall family conflict, perceptions of school environment, and emotional and behavioral health problems among children ages 10-11.

Methods: The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study data release 3.

Conduct problems are associated with accelerated thinning of emotion-related cortical regions in a community-based sample of adolescents.

Few studies have examined the association between conduct problems and cerebral cortical development. Herein, we characterize the association between age-related brain change and conduct problems in a large longitudinal, community-based sample of adolescents. 1,039 participants from the IMAGEN study possessed psychopathology and surface-based morphometric data at study baseline (M = 14.

Machine learning approaches linking brain function to behavior in the ABCD STOP task.

The stop-signal task (SST) is one of the most common fMRI tasks of response inhibition, and its performance measure, the stop-signal reaction-time (SSRT), is broadly used as a measure of cognitive control processes. The neurobiology underlying individual or clinical differences in response inhibition remain unclear, consistent with the general pattern of quite modest brain-behavior associations that have been recently reported in well-powered large-sample studies. Here, we investigated the potential of multivariate, machine learning (ML) methods to improve the estimation of individual differences in SSRT with multimodal structural and functional region of interest-level neuroimaging data from 9- to 11-year-olds children in the ABCD Study.

Cortical profiles of numerous psychiatric disorders and normal development share a common pattern.

The neurobiological bases of the association between development and psychopathology remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a shared spatial pattern of cortical thickness (CT) in normative development and several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to CT of 68 regions in the Desikan-Killiany atlas derived from three large-scale datasets comprising a total of 41,075 neurotypical participants.

Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children.

Importance: Although most research has linked video gaming to subsequent increases in aggressive behavior in children after accounting for prior aggression, findings have been divided with respect to video gaming's association with cognitive skills.

Objective: To examine the association between video gaming and cognition in children using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

Design, Setting, And Participants: In this case-control study, cognitive performance and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal were compared in video gamers (VGs) and non-video gamers (NVGs) during response inhibition and working memory using task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a large data set of 9- and 10-year-old children from the ABCD study, with good control of demographic, behavioral, and psychiatric confounding effects.

Characterizing reward system neural trajectories from adolescence to young adulthood.

Mixed findings exist in studies comparing brain responses to reward in adolescents and adults. Here we examined the trajectories of brain response, functional connectivity and task-modulated network properties during reward processing with a large-sample longitudinal design. Participants from the IMAGEN study performed a Monetary Incentive Delay task during fMRI at timepoint 1 (T1; n = 1304, mean age=14.

Association of Cannabis Use During Adolescence With Neurodevelopment.

Importance: Animal studies have shown that the adolescent brain is sensitive to disruptions in endocannabinoid signaling, resulting in altered neurodevelopment and lasting behavioral effects. However, few studies have investigated ties between cannabis use and adolescent brain development in humans.

Objective: To examine the degree to which magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-assessed cerebral cortical thickness development is associated with cannabis use in a longitudinal sample of adolescents.

Sex Differences in Psychopathology in a Large Cohort of Nine and Ten-Year-Olds.

The current study quantified sex differences in psychopathology among 9 and 10-year-olds, examined sex differences among those with clinically elevated symptoms and investigated if puberty moderates the relationship between sex and psychopathology. Data were obtained from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD)® Study's NDA data release 2.0.

Multimodal brain predictors of current weight and weight gain in children enrolled in the ABCD study ®.

Multimodal neuroimaging assessments were utilized to identify generalizable brain correlates of current body mass index (BMI) and predictors of pathological weight gain (i.e., beyond normative development) one year later.

Rates of Incidental Findings in Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Children.

Importance: Incidental findings (IFs) are unexpected abnormalities discovered during imaging and can range from normal anatomic variants to findings requiring urgent medical intervention. In the case of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), reliable data about the prevalence and significance of IFs in the general population are limited, making it difficult to anticipate, communicate, and manage these findings.

Objectives: To determine the overall prevalence of IFs in brain MRI in the nonclinical pediatric population as well as the rates of specific findings and findings for which clinical referral is recommended.

Correspondence Between Perceived Pubertal Development and Hormone Levels in 9-10 Year-Olds From the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

Aim: To examine individual variability between perceived physical features and hormones of pubertal maturation in 9-10-year-old children as a function of sociodemographic characteristics.

Methods: Cross-sectional metrics of puberty were utilized from the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study-a multi-site sample of 9-10 year-olds (n = 11,875)-and included perceived physical features the pubertal development scale (PDS) and child salivary hormone levels (dehydroepiandrosterone and testosterone in all, and estradiol in females). Multi-level models examined the relationships among sociodemographic measures, physical features, and hormone levels.

Examination of the association between exposure to childhood maltreatment and brain structure in young adults: a machine learning analysis.

Exposure to maltreatment during childhood is associated with structural changes throughout the brain. However, the structural differences that are most strongly associated with maltreatment remain unclear given the limited number of whole-brain studies. The present study used machine learning to identify if and how brain structure distinguished young adults with and without a history of maltreatment.

Multimethod investigation of the neurobiological basis of ADHD symptomatology in children aged 9-10: baseline data from the ABCD study.

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is associated with numerous neurocognitive deficits, including poor working memory and difficulty inhibiting undesirable behaviors that cause academic and behavioral problems in children. Prior work has attempted to determine how these differences are instantiated in the structure and function of the brain, but much of that work has been done in small samples, focused on older adolescents or adults, and used statistical approaches that were not robust to model overfitting. The current study used cross-validated elastic net regression to predict a continuous measure of ADHD symptomatology using brain morphometry and activation during tasks of working memory, inhibitory control, and reward processing, with separate models for each MRI measure.

Individual Differences in Cognitive Performance Are Better Predicted by Global Rather Than Localized BOLD Activity Patterns Across the Cortex.

Despite its central role in revealing the neurobiological mechanisms of behavior, neuroimaging research faces the challenge of producing reliable biomarkers for cognitive processes and clinical outcomes. Statistically significant brain regions, identified by mass univariate statistical models commonly used in neuroimaging studies, explain minimal phenotypic variation, limiting the translational utility of neuroimaging phenotypes. This is potentially due to the observation that behavioral traits are influenced by variations in neuroimaging phenotypes that are globally distributed across the cortex and are therefore not captured by thresholded, statistical parametric maps commonly reported in neuroimaging studies.

Substance Use Initiation, Particularly Alcohol, in Drug-Naive Adolescents: Possible Predictors and Consequences From a Large Cohort Naturalistic Study.

Objective: It is unclear whether deviations in brain and behavioral development, which may underpin elevated substance use during adolescence, are predispositions for or consequences of substance use initiation. Here, we examine behavioral and neuroimaging indices at early and mid-adolescence in drug-naive youths to identify possible predisposing factors for substance use initiation and its possible consequences.

Method: Among 304 drug-naive adolescents at baseline (age 14 years) from the IMAGEN dataset, 83 stayed drug-naive, 133 used alcohol on 1 to 9 occasions, 42 on 10 to 19 occasions, 27 on 20 to 39 occasions, and 19 on >40 occasions at follow-up (age 16 years).

Neural Correlates of Adolescent Irritability and Its Comorbidity With Psychiatric Disorders.

Objective: Irritable mood, a common and impairing symptom in psychopathology, has been proposed to underlie the developmental link between oppositional problems in youth and depression in adulthood. We examined the neural correlates of adolescent irritability in IMAGEN, a sample of 2,024 14-year-old adolescents from 5 European countries.

Method: The Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA) was used to assess attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, major depressive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.

Longitudinal associations between amygdala reactivity and cannabis use in a large sample of adolescents.

Rationale: The amygdala is a key brain structure to study in relation to cannabis use as reflected by its high-density of cannabinoid receptors and functional reactivity to processes relevant to drug use. Previously, we identified a correlation between cannabis use in early adolescence and amygdala hyper-reactivity to angry faces (Spechler et al. 2015).