Heritability of Screen Time in the ABCD Study

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) is a longitudinal study of brain development and child health in the United States. About 4500 subjects were included in the first wave of data collection. Released data... [ view full abstract ]

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) is a longitudinal study of brain development and child health in the United States. About 4500 subjects were included in the first wave of data collection. Released data on 96 SNPs, family membership, and age at testing were used to identify 105 MZ twin pairs and 133 DZ twin pairs. All subjects were born in the years 2005 through 2008, and were interviewed between the month of their ninth birthday and their eleventh birthday. As markers of the beginning of the era of near ubiquitous Internet-enabled computing devices, the iPhone was released in June, 2007 and the iPad in April, 2010. That means the subjects in ABCD were some of the first to have modern, pocket computing devices widely available from early childhood. The mean self reported, non-school related screen time is 24.69 (SD=19.38) hours per week for boys and 19.41 (SD=17.49) for girls. Twin modeling shows for males V_A=0.26, V_C=0.32, V_E=0.42 and for females V_A=0.50, V_C=0.06, V_E=0.45.