Summary: The first major data release from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study delivers an unprecedented resource for studying early childhood brain development. This release shares rich biomedical, behavioral, and environmental data from more than 1,400 pregnant people and their children, collected from pregnancy through nine months of age.
Combining infant brain imaging, EEG, genomic information, behavioral assessments, and wearable biosensor records, the HBCD data provide a comprehensive view of early life factors that shape neurodevelopment and child health. Hosted on the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub, these data are positioned to accelerate global research into infant brain development, environmental influences, and early-life risk and resilience.
Key Facts
- Scale: The largest U.S. longitudinal study of early brain development, conducted across 27 sites nationwide.
- Data Depth: Includes detailed prenatal exposure histories, infant brain scans, EEG recordings, cognitive and behavioral testing, biosensor and wearable data, and genomic measures.
- Open Research Value: Curated to support open, reproducible research and to enable worldwide scientific inquiry into early neurodevelopment and child health outcomes.
Source: UCSD
Researchers at the University of California San Diego, part of the national HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study Consortium, have released the study’s first major dataset, giving scientists around the world new opportunities to address fundamental questions about human brain development during infancy.
This inaugural release includes extensive biomedical and behavioral data from more than 1,400 pregnant participants and their infants. Data were collected at multiple timepoints spanning pregnancy and the first nine months after birth, covering prenatal exposures, birth outcomes, early behavior, and physiological measures.
“This data release is a game-changer,” said Christina Chambers, Ph.D., co-director of the HBCD Study Administrative Core and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine. The HBCD Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), represents the most extensive longitudinal effort in the United States to map early brain and child development.
The study was carried out across 27 participating sites and organized through an Administrative Core and a Data Core to ensure rigorous collection, curation, and sharing of multimodal data. HBCD data were released in collaboration with colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, and are made available through the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub.
The NBDC Data Hub also hosts data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, creating a powerful combined resource that links early infancy datasets with adolescent brain and behavioral data. Together, these cohorts enable researchers to trace developmental trajectories across childhood and adolescence and to study how early exposures relate to later outcomes.
The HBCD data release includes a wide array of measures useful for neurodevelopmental research and public health investigation:
- Detailed prenatal health records and exposure data, including substance use and environmental exposures;
- Social and environmental determinants of health, such as socioeconomic and neighborhood information;
- Infant brain imaging data and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings that capture early neural activity;
- Standardized cognitive, behavioral, and physical assessments administered across early visits;
- Wearable biosensor data that document physiological and activity patterns in daily life;
- Genomic and other biological samples supporting molecular and genetic analyses.
“Researchers in child development and neuroscience now have at their fingertips rich, longitudinal brain, behavioral and genomic data from these pivotal studies, which will enable a new generation of breakthroughs,” said Charles A. Nelson III, Ph.D., co-director of the HBCD Study Administrative Core and professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. Investigators anticipate that these open data will foster collaborative science, encourage reproducibility, and generate hypotheses that lead to better prevention and intervention strategies for at-risk children.
By making these high-quality, harmonized datasets openly available, the HBCD Study and the NBDC Data Hub aim to reduce barriers to discovery in developmental neuroscience and public health. Researchers can use the data to study how prenatal and early-life exposures influence brain structure and function, identify early markers of developmental delay or resilience, and evaluate the interplay of genetics, environment, and behavior in shaping long-term outcomes.
Funding: Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Institutes of Health under award numbers U01DA055352, U01DA055353, U01DA055366, U01DA055365, U01DA055362, U01DA055342, U01DA055360, U01DA055350, U01DA055338, U01DA055355, U01DA055363, U01DA055349, U01DA055361, U01DA055316, U01DA055344, U01DA055322, U01DA055369, U01DA055358, U01DA055371, U01DA055359, U01DA055354, U01DA055370, U01DA055347, U01DA055357, U01DA055367, U24DA055325, U24DA055330, U01DA041048, U01DA050989, U01DA051016, U01DA041022, U01DA051018, U01DA051037, U01DA050987, U01DA041174, U01DA041106, U01DA041117, U01DA041028, U01DA041134, U01DA050988, U01DA051039, U01DA041156, U01DA041025, U01DA041120, U01DA051038, U01DA041148, U01DA041093, U01DA041089, U24DA041123, & U24DA041147.
The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
About this neurodevelopment research news
Author: Miles Martin
Source: UCSD
Contact: Miles Martin – UCSD
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News