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The Hertfordshire Cohort Study
The Hertfordshire Cohort Study consists of a group of unique studies of men and women born in the English county of Hertfordshire between 1911 and 1939.

The main aim of these studies is to discover as much as possible about how a person’s inbuilt makeup (genome), and the environment they experienced during early life (in the womb and first few years of childhood), affect their health and ageing in later life.

The study was established in the mid 1980s, and is based at the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in Southampton.

The Hertfordshire Records
The Hertfordshire records were started by Miss Ethel Margaret Burnside and her team of nurses in 1911 as part of an attempt to improve the survival of infants in the county. This was at a time when Britain’s birth rate was declining and the death rates among babies were high.

A midwife attended women during childbirth and recorded the birth weight of their offspring on a card. A health visitor subsequently went to each baby's home throughout its infancy and recorded its illnesses, development and method of infant feeding; the baby was then weighed again at 1 year of age. This information was transcribed into ledgers at the Hertfordshire county office (Figure 1). The ledgers cover all births in Hertfordshire from 1911 until the NHS was formed in 1948.

MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit
The MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit is based at Southampton General Hospital. The director of the unit is Professor Cyrus Cooper.

MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit