Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) was launched in 1991 to help understand the genetic and environmental factors involved in the development of particular diseases. Researchers have been following 14 000 children born in the early 1990s in the former county of Avon, England, and their parents. The long-term, large scale population study will monitor the health and lifestyle of the children, and that of their offspring, until they reach 70 years old.

Some of the ALSPAC participants playing a game with Professor Jean Golding in 2001. Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The development, health and behaviour of children can vary markedly, but how much of this variation is due to genes, and how much is influenced by the environment they grow up in? Teasing out the relationships and interactions between environmental factors and individual genotypes is extremely difficult, and requires vast amounts of data for researchers to study. This is where the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) comes in.

ALSPAC (also known as the 'Children of the 90s') has been studying children born in the early 1990s in the former county of Avon, England and their parents for over 15 years. Detailed records are kept of everyday characteristics such as diet, lifestyle, socioeconomic status, parent–child contact and so on, as well as tens of thousands of samples of urine, blood and DNA.

As a long-term, large-scale population study ALSPAC offers a chance to study the biological and environmental influences affecting a person's health. It has accrued a wealth of health and lifestyle data collated from questionnaires completed by parents, physical examinations of children, health records, biological sample analysis and tests on the home environment. A teenage advisory panel is involving young participants in ALSPAC's operations. In July 2010, the Wellcome Trust renewed core funding for the project in partnership with the Medical Research Council, totalling £6 million over the next three years.