The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) is a large research initiative by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on the effects of opiate addiction on child brain development. Knowledge of normative brain trajectories is critical to understanding how they may be affected by exposure to opioids and other substances (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, cannabis), stressors, trauma, and other significant environmental influences, including those that promote resilience. Data collected by HBCD will be fundamental to establishing links between early environmental and biological factors, both adverse and protective, and subsequent health or behavioural outcomes.
HBCD will establish a state-of-the-art, longitudinal data set of unprecedented scope and scale that will identify critical periods of neurodevelopment in infancy and childhood and address essential questions regarding the impact of high-risk environments, including prenatal substance exposure, on health, brain and behavioural trajectories. The McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN) lab provides the neuroinformatics platform for the HBCD Data Coordinating Centre, and is building the HBCD data infrastructure, initially through an expansion of LORIS data management capabilities and subsequently through the integration of CBRAIN to support data processing.
