Edited by: Mark Walton, University of Oxford, UK
Reviewed by: Daniel Beracochea, Bordeaux 1 University, France
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Addictive Disorders and Behavioral Dyscontrol, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
U.S. President Barack Obama recently announced a new Precision Medicine Initiative, and Drs. Francis Collins and Harold Varmus have begun to provide a vision for how some of this initiative might be implemented by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) (
Numerous studies suggest that heavy substance use during childhood and adolescence influences long-term brain and cognitive development and heightens risks for SUDs and co-occurring mental disorders (
The ABCD study will leverage latest brain imaging advances, bioinformatics methods for analyzing biomedical big data, and electronic health records information to determine how substance use affects brain-development trajectories, relevant gene-environment interactions, memory capabilities, mental disorders, and other medical and functional outcomes. Another consideration is achieving sufficient statistical power and comprehensive controls to account for the many possible confounds in which youth who choose to frequently use alcohol or other drugs might also have other co-occurring problems either naturally or due to other lifestyle choices or circumstances. The ABCD study will also carefully characterize and control for socio-demographic, prenatal drug exposure, drug availability, family history, physical or sexual abuse, head trauma, behavioral, and other environmental risk factors (
Open data sharing and safeguarding privacy need to be cornerstones for such lines of research, to build a trustworthy scientific knowledge base and support a national network of scientists with innovative precision-medicine approaches to SUDs prevention and treatment. Collected genetic biospecimens need to be appropriately paired with other relevant health information and suitably processed, curated, and stored, in a manner whereby informed consent is obtained consistent with allowing participants’ permission for their future research use. Furthermore, to maintain high-quality repositories of biomedical big data, such research areas would need to develop sustainable operational and governance standards and conform to industry best practices (
In summary, the ABCD study and similar research offer a valuable opportunity to inform precision-medicine research on how to leverage bioinformatics advances in genomics and health information technology to guide customization of molecular, clinical, and environmental information toward optimizing SUD-prevention in youth. Findings from such research may also guide precision medicine through systematic identification of risk/protective factors, biomarkers, and individual variations in these, which critically mediate effects of substance use on the trajectory of the developing brain, memory, and other cognitive areas in youth.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
UG is an employee of the Center for the Clinical Trials Network, NIDA, which is the funding agency for the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network. The opinions in this paper are those of the author and do not represent the official position of the U.S. government.