NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch Brain Development Study

The Child Psychiatry Branch of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has run a longitudinal structural MRI study of brain development since 1989. Children, adolescents and young adults return to the NIH roughly every two years for an MRI scan, neuropsychological testing and genetic analysis. The study charts how grey matter, white matter, cerebrospinal fluid and cerebellar volumes change from childhood into early adulthood, and compares them with trajectories in ADHD and childhood-onset schizophrenia. The 2015 overview paper describes the cohort and its main findings; no public release of the images was found.

Composition

By August 2014 the database held more than 6000 scans from more than 2000 participants. About half were typically developing and about half came from clinical groups, mainly ADHD, autism and childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS). More than 800 scans came from twins. The normative results in the paper use 1171 scans of 618 typically developing males and females aged 5 to 25 years. The COS group, defined by psychosis onset before age 13, had 102 cases at the time of writing. The paper gives no breakdown of the total by sex, age or diagnosis.

Acquisition

Participants were scanned at the NIH, with repeat visits at about two-year intervals. The overview paper does not state the scanner model, field strength or sequence parameters. Structures were measured with automated software such as FreeSurfer, with hand tracing for some structures.

Known limitations

• No public release of the images was found, and no license or data use terms are published.
• Totals are approximate and dated to August 2014; the study continued afterwards.
• The overview paper reports no acquisition protocol, so scanner and contrast details are missing from this entry.
• Counts for ADHD and autism participants are not given.