The world’s longest continuously running birth cohort study, which follows thousands of participants born in the first week of March 1946 and is hosted by UCL, is celebrating its 80th birthday.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), also known as the British 1946 birth cohort, has advanced understanding of what affects our health and wellbeing over a lifetime.
Through questionnaires, clinic visits, and home visits, these study members have helped shape our knowledge of developmental milestones, education, diet, exercise, mental and physical health and healthy ageing across the life course.
Findings have helped reveal how early life conditions, schooling and social circumstances influence adult health, chronic disease and later-life function, and provided evidence on topics ranging from childhood lung infections and later respiratory disease, to the long-term effects of diet and physical activity, to the lasting effects of childhood social inequalities.
Professor Nishi Chaturvedi, Director of the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL, said: "On the NSHD’s 80th birthday, we want to extend our deepest thanks to every study member. Their lifelong contributions have been invaluable to medical science, and their generosity with their time continues to make this work possible."
The origins of the study go back to the 1930s, a period when concerns were growing about declining birth rates and the rising cost of having children. Policymakers feared that financial pressures were discouraging families from expanding. The result was the Maternity Survey of 1946, which captured every birth that took place in England, Wales, and Scotland during a single week in March of that year. Its success was immediate and influential, paving the way for nurses to be able to offer pain relief in childbirth.
From this initial survey, a cohort of 5,362 babies was selected for continued follow-up, and remarkably, more than 2,000 are still taking part eight decades later.
In recent years, the NSHD has become a flagship study of ageing, with study members taking part in clinical sub-studies to improve our understanding to dementia and poor heart health:
- Insight 46. This sub-study uses detailed brain scans, memory tests, and cardiovascular measures to identify early brain changes linked to dementia risk. Now in its 10th year, it has increased our understanding on the factors leading to dementia, including the links with the amyloid protein in the brain and dementia; the effects of shift working on the brain; and the effects of air pollution on brain health. It has also shown that a blood test may help diagnose people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. (The test is now being trialled in centres across the UK.)
MyoFit 46. This sub-study focused on the heart, using cardiac imaging to investigate cardiac ageing. The study has found that even moderately elevated blood pressure in early adulthood increases later heart disease risk. The study has developed a cardiac MRI vest, which non-invasively maps the heart’s electrical activity, enabling safer diagnosis of heart rhythm problems.
UCL is home to some of the world’s most impactful cohort studies which have shaped our understanding of health. These include the 1958 National Child Development Study, the 1970 British Cohort Study, the Millennium Cohort Study and the most recent study, Generation New Era, which is led by a team at UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies and aims to recruit more than 30,000 babies born this year.
Note: UCL200
2026 also marks a major milestone for UCL - 200 years since we were founded as the first university in London. UCL200 promises an exciting and varied programme of activities, events and storytelling, aiming to celebrate and reinforce UCL’s commitment to our founding values, highlight the excellence and impact of our groundbreaking work and people, and present an ambitious and inspiring portrait of our future. Highlights of the UCL200 programme include: a major new free exhibition - Two Centuries Here - that explores UCL’s past, present and future; a public art programme ; and three specially published books about the histories of UCL, Bloomsbury and students in London.
- Study members during childhood.
Mark Greaves
m.greaves [at] ucl.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 3108 9485
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
