Influential UK birth cohort studies to be brought together for first time

One outcome of the IOE and UCL merger coming into effect today will be that all five of the UK's national birth cohort studies will be housed at the same institution for the first time, forming the largest concentration of birth cohort expertise in the world. Cohort studies are a type of longitudinal research that follow the same group of people throughout their lives, charting health and social changes and untangling the reasons behind them. The UK has more birth cohort studies than any other country in the world and they play a pivotal role in measuring the health and wellbeing of society. The merger marks a major advance for these influential and world-renowned studies, which have followed the lives of generations of Britons since 1946. The IOE has long been home to the 1958, 1970 and millennium cohort studies, which form the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. They will join the two other national birth cohort studies - the oldest and newest - that are based at UCL. One is the Medical Research Council (MRC) National Survey of Health and Development (the 1946 cohort study), the other is Life Study, which will follow more than 80,000 babies born between 2014 and 2018.