With MRI data, results from cognitive tests, and information from interviews and questionnaires with parents and children, the study is building an enormous database that will be useful to researchers with unanswered questions. Researchers are capturing both typical brain development and what happens in the brain when problems develop. The ABCD Study is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. Photo courtesy of Loralyn Cross.Īurora Cross wears her ABCD Study t-shirt. Thanks to data collection that had already been going for two years, scientists involved in the study will have a unique perspective on the pandemic’s impact on long-term health.Īurora Cross wears her ABCD Study t-shirt. In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns affected every child in the ABCD Study. Study staff will see her and the other young participants for regular tests, surveys, and MRIs until they are 18 or 19. In 2018, when she was 9, she and nearly 12,000 other kids her age were invited to join the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “You play these games where you have to actually pay attention, not one of those games you can kind of zone out.” She does this for two hours, every other year, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).Īurora is helping scientists learn how children’s brains grow and develop as they transition to adulthood. “You definitely want to fall asleep, but you can’t,” she said. She still needs to see, so she wears plastic goggles with prescription lenses popped in.Īurora lies still inside the MRI machine while it takes images of the structure of her brain and her brain activity when she performs cognitive tasks. “It’s a cold room and I have to take my glasses off because they have metal in them,” she explained. Aurora Cross has more experience with MRIs than the average 12-year-old - and most adults.
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