The population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo TEEN Cohort (pn-TTC): a cohort longitudinal study to explore the neurobiological substrates of adolescent psychological and behavioral development.

AIM: Adolescence is a crucial stage of psychological development and is critically vulnerable to the onset of psychopathology. However, our understanding of how maturation of endocrine, epigenetics, and brain circuit may underlie the psychological development in adolescence has not been integrated. Here, we introduce our research project, the "population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo TEEN Cohort (pn-TTC)," a longitudinal study to explore the neurobiological substrates of development during adolescence.

METHODS: Participants in the first wave of the pn-TTC (pn-TTC-1) study were recruited from those of the TTC study, a large-scale epidemiological survey in which 3,171 parent-adolescent pairs were recruited from the general population. Psychological, cognitive, sociological, and physical measures were acquired from participants. Moreover, adolescents and their parents underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning (structural MRI, resting-state functional MRI, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy), and adolescents provided saliva samples for hormone analysis and for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis including epigenetics. Furthermore, the second wave (pn-TTC-2) was also performed.

RESULTS: A total of 301 parent-adolescent pairs participated in the pn-TTC-1 study. Moreover, 281 adolescents participated in the pn-TTC-2 study, 238 of which were recruited from the pn-TTC-1 sample. The instruction for data request is available at: https://value.umin.jp/data-resource.html.

CONCLUSION: The pn-TTC project is a large-scale and population-neuroscience-based survey with a plan of longitudinal biennial follow-up. Through this approach we seek to elucidate adolescent developmental mechanisms according to bio-psycho-social models. Our current biomarker research project, using minimally-biased samples recruited from the general population, has the potential to expand a new research field of "population neuroscience." This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.