Information BCS70 participants have shared with the study is helping researchers understand the factors that have made people more vulnerable to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers welcomed Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge to UCL this week, and discussed the invaluable contribution longitudinal cohort studies like BCS70 have made to our understanding of early child development and the factors that shape our lives.

A new study based on BCS70 has found that people of your generation who grew up in poorer families are at much greater risk of having multiple long-term health problems in their late 40s. The research also reveals an association between physical and mental health conditions in childhood, and chronic health problems in middle age.

Children with severe behaviour and hyperactivity problems at age five tend to do less well in vocabulary assessments as teenagers, according to a new study using data from BCS70 and the Millennium Cohort Study, which follows a generation of young people born in 2000-02.

Professor Alissa Goodman, Director of the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS), where BCS70 is based, has been awarded a CBE for her services to social science in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021.

We’ve now reached the end of our year-long celebration of the 1970 British Cohort Study. Over the past 50 weeks, we’ve traversed five decades of British social and political history, to tell the story of BCS70. Over to you, BCS70 heroes, for the final word in our 50 stories in 50 weeks journey…

From this summer, we hope to start catching up with you all to find out how your generation is faring in your early 50s. The survey will take place over at least 12 months, and at first we’ll be asking study members to take part via a video call.

We are now inviting everyone who completed one or more of our three COVID-19 surveys to take part in a COVID-19 antibody test. This will help us build a clearer picture of who has had COVID-19 and learn more about why some people develop severe disease and others do not.

Over 18,000 study members, then aged 19, 30, 50, 62 and 74, completed this first COVID-19 survey, providing invaluable insights into the varying ways the crisis impacted them. Here’s a summary of our researchers’ initial findings.

The COVID-19 Survey was the first time that we asked you to complete the same survey at the same time as participants in four other studies (born in 1946, 1958, 1989-90 and 2000-02).