About this session

Friday, 4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study: Charting Development Across the First Years of Life

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study was developed to create a multimodal publicly accessible data set to address major gaps in knowledge regarding the effects of diverse environments on children’s brain and behavioral development. HBCD is a multi-site prospective longitudinal cohort study that will examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development beginning prenatally and planned through age 10. HBCD aims to determine the short- and long-term impacts of a variety of both harmful and protective environmental factors, including prenatal substance exposure, on developmental trajectories in infancy and early childhood.
The consortium of 27 sites across the United States includes an administrative core, a data coordinating center, and 27 recruitment sites. The HBCD cohort with a final sample of 7500 families will consist of three sub-cohorts of pregnant women and their infants, including 50% of the sample who represent the diversity of the US reproductive-aged population, 25% of the sample with Substance Use (SU) exposure during pregnancy and 25% of the sample who are demographically and behaviorally similar to the SU cohort but without SU in pregnancy. There are dual challenges to recruiting and retaining the HBCD cohort. The first data release will occur in January of 2025. The four papers presented in this symposium will overview the study and its components, will address issues of recruitment and retention of a diverse sample, will describe the developmental measures of socio-emotional behavior, and will address the ethical issues with data collection and dissemination.

Paper #1
Title	Overview, goals and structure of the Healthy Brain and Child Development Study
Presenting author	Charles A. Nelson, III, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, United States

Paper #2
Title	HBCD Study Strategies to Recruit and Retain Participants Exposed to Adversity
Presenting author	Oziomachuckwu Chinaka, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Assessing Child Behavior and Caregiver-Child Interactions in HBCD Using a Rigorous and Equitable Approach
Presenting author	Amanda Sheffield Morris, Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Ethics and the Idea of Participant Vulnerability in the HBCD Study
Presenting author	Pilar Nicole Ossorio, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Nathan A. Fox, Ph.D., University of Maryland, United States

⇦ Back to schedule