Publications by authors named "Sandra A. Brown"

This editorial focuses on the issue of data misuse which is increasingly evidenced in social media as well as some premiere scientific journals. This issue is of critical importance to open science projects in general, and ABCD in particular, given the broad array of biological, behavioral and environmental information collected on this American sample of 12.000 youth and parents.

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Substantial increases in depression at the outset of the pandemic were previously reported in NCANDA, a longitudinal sample of adolescents and young adults. The current NCANDA study examined depression symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluated the influence of stressors and social behavior (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Research highlights a critical gap in understanding long COVID (PASC) in children and emphasizes the need for studies that define its characteristics in this age group.
  • The objective is to identify common prolonged symptoms in children aged 6 to 17 post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, examining differences between school-age kids and adolescents, as well as potential symptom clusters for future research.
  • A multicenter study involved nearly 5,000 participants, revealing that certain symptoms were significantly more prevalent in those with a history of COVID-19 compared to those without.
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Purpose: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and potentially traumatic events (PTEs) contribute to increased substance use, mental health issues, and cognitive impairments. However, there's not enough research on how TBI and PTEs combined impact mental heath, substance use, and neurocognition.

Methods: This study leverages a subset of The National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) multi-site dataset with 551 adolescents to assess the combined and distinctive impacts of TBI, PTEs, and TBI+PTEs (prior to age 18) on substance use, mental health, and neurocognitive outcomes at age 18.

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Heavy alcohol drinking is a major, preventable problem that adversely impacts the physical and mental health of US young adults. Studies seeking drinking risk factors typically focus on young adults who enrolled in 4-year residential college programs (4YCP) even though most high school graduates join the workforce, military, or community colleges. We examined 106 of these understudied young adults (USYA) and 453 4YCPs from the National Consortium on Alcohol and NeuroDevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) by longitudinally following their drinking patterns for 8 years from adolescence to young adulthood.

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  • The paper critiques the existing definitions and measurements of parental monitoring, highlighting their vague and inconsistent nature, which has led to a fragmented understanding of the concept in research.
  • It introduces a clearer definition of parental monitoring as the behaviors caregivers use to gather information about their child's activities, proposing a taxonomy of five distinct types of monitoring behaviors.
  • The authors aim to differentiate parental monitoring from similar parenting concepts and emphasize its role in the dynamic relationship between caregivers and youth, promoting more rigorous research in the field.
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Background: To investigate relationships among different physical health problems in a large, sociodemographically diverse sample of 9-to-10-year-old children and determine the extent to which perinatal health factors are associated with childhood physical health problems.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted utilizing the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ (ABCD) Study (n = 7613, ages 9-to-10-years-old) to determine the associations among multiple physical health factors (e.g.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and substance use (SU) are common in adolescence, but the causal links between them haven't been thoroughly researched or understood, especially considering factors like genetics and demographics.
  • - The study used data from over 11,000 adolescents to track the relationship between PTEs and SU over time, adjusting for various influences that might skew results, such as age and peer behavior.
  • - Results indicated that while PTEs were associated with increased levels of substance use, particularly for alcohol and nicotine, the reverse was not true; prior substance use did not predict future PTEs, highlighting a potential one-way influence.
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Introduction: Consumption of fast food has been linked to psychiatric distress, violent behaviors, and impulsivity in adolescents. The relationship between eating fast food, anger, and impulsivity has not been widely investigated. The National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence community-based cohort consists of 831 youth, half at elevated risk factors for substance use disorders during adolescence, followed annually.

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Objective: The purpose of this study was to test two non-exclusive mechanisms by which parental monitoring might reduce teen substance use. The first mechanism (M1) is that monitoring increases punishment for substance use since parents who monitor more are more likely to find out when substance use occurs. The second mechanism (M2) is that monitoring directly prevents/averts teens from using substances in the first place for fear that parents would find out.

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The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study was launched by the Collaborative Research on Addiction at NIH (CRAN) in 2016 and is now supported by 11 other federal agencies and centers. The six primary aims of ABCD were to: Develop national standards for normal brain development for youth ages 9-19 years; Determine individual developmental trajectories (e.g.

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Background And Aims: Recently, we demonstrated that a distinct pattern of structural covariance networks (SCN) from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-derived measurements of brain cortical thickness characterized young adults with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and predicted current and future problematic drinking in adolescents relative to controls. Here, we establish the robustness and value of SCN for identifying heavy alcohol users in three additional independent studies.

Design And Setting: Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies using data from the Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition and Genetics (PING) study (n = 400, age range = 14-22 years), the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) (n = 272, age range = 17-22 years) and the Human Connectome Project (HCP) (n = 375, age range = 22-37 years).

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Subcortical brain morphometry matures across adolescence and young adulthood, a time when many youth engage in escalating levels of alcohol use. Initial cross-sectional studies have shown alcohol use is associated with altered subcortical morphometry. However, longitudinal evidence of sex-specific neuromaturation and associations with alcohol use remains limited.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to assess how early adolescent substance use changed from May 2020 to May 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which involved 9,270 participants aged 11.5-13.0.
  • Key findings indicated a significant decrease in alcohol use during the pandemic, from 3.2% prepandemic to just 0.3% by May 2021, while there were slight increases in inhalant use and prescription drug misuse during the same period.
  • The results highlighted disparities in substance use changes among different racial and income groups, suggesting that ongoing pandemic-related conditions may have long-lasting effects on youth substance use patterns.
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Cannabis use and occurrences of depression during adolescence are common. However, the temporal relationship between the two is less understood. Does depression lead to cannabis use, or does cannabis use lead to depression, or is it a combination of both? Furthermore, this directionality is confounded by other substance use, specifically binge drinking, which is common during adolescence.

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Study Objectives: Adolescence is characterized by significant brain development, accompanied by changes in sleep timing and architecture. It also is a period of profound psychosocial changes, including the initiation of alcohol use; however, it is unknown how alcohol use affects sleep architecture in the context of adolescent development. We tracked developmental changes in polysomnographic (PSG) and electroencephalographic (EEG) sleep measures and their relationship with emergent alcohol use in adolescents considering confounding effects (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluated how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced sleep habits and recreational screen time among adolescents, revealing a significant increase in screen time and changes in sleep patterns.
  • Using data from 5,027 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, researchers found that screen time rose steeply during the pandemic, leading to shorter sleep durations and later bedtimes.
  • The results emphasize that while screen activities can help maintain social connections during challenging times, excessive use can negatively impact sleep quality, indicating a need for healthier screen time habits.
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Background: Though largely substance-naïve at enrollment, a proportion of the youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study are expected to initiate substance use (SU) as they transition into later adolescence. With annual data from youth 9-13 years-old, this study aims to describe their SU patterns over time. Here, prevalence rates of use are reported, along with predicted odds of use while analyzing common risk-factors associated with youth SU.

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Background: Between 20 % and 30 % of teens suffer from depression or anxiety before reaching adulthood, and up to half also use or misuse alcohol. Although theories suggest bidirectional links between harmful alcohol use (e.g.

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  • A study aimed to clarify the causal relationship between parental knowledge/monitoring and adolescent substance use by observing changes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Researchers surveyed nearly 8,800 youths aged 10.5 to 15.6 over 12 months, gathering data on their parents' monitoring and their own substance use.
  • Results indicated that decreases in perceived parental monitoring led to more youth starting substance use, while increases in monitoring helped some youth stop using substances, supporting the idea that parent involvement plays a significant role in adolescent substance behavior.
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Cortical thickness changes dramatically during development and is associated with adolescent drinking. However, previous findings have been inconsistent and limited by region-of-interest approaches that are underpowered because they do not conform to the underlying spatially heterogeneous effects of alcohol. In this study, adolescents (n = 657; 12-22 years at baseline) from the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) study who endorsed little to no alcohol use at baseline were assessed with structural magnetic resonance imaging and followed longitudinally at four yearly intervals.

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To determine the persistent effects of the pandemic on mental health in young adults, we categorized depressive symptom trajectories and sought factors that promoted a reduction in depressive symptoms in high-risk individuals. Specifically, longitudinal analysis investigated changes in the risk for depression before and during the pandemic until December 2021 in 399 young adults (57% female; age range: 22.8 ± 2.

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Background: Accurate measurement of trajectories in longitudinal studies, considered the gold standard method for tracking functional growth during adolescence, decline in aging, and change after head injury, is subject to confounding by testing experience.

Methods: We measured change in cognitive and motor abilities over four test sessions (baseline and three annual assessments) in 154 male and 165 female participants (baseline age 12-21 years) from the National Consortium on Alcohol and NeuroDevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) study. At each of the four test sessions, these participants were given a test battery using computerized administration and traditional pencil and paper tests that yielded accuracy and speed measures for multiple component cognitive (Abstraction, Attention, Emotion, Episodic memory, Working memory, and General Ability) and motor (Ataxia and Speed) functions.

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Article Synopsis
  • Families faced major financial and social challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in significant impacts on family well-being.
  • The study found that preexisting psychosocial issues and financial struggles before the pandemic contributed to poorer family outcomes, which were worsened by material hardships during lockdown.
  • Parental drinking habits negatively affected family relationships, but effective coping strategies appeared to improve overall family well-being, highlighting the need for financial and mental health support in times of crisis.
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