Glasgow Students Study
Research type
Research Database
IRAS ID
331509
Contact name
David Carslake
Contact email
Research summary
Glasgow Students Study
REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
26/EM/0008
Date of REC Opinion
11 Feb 2026
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion
Data collection arrangements
We will be storing data from questionnaires completed when the participants were students at the University of Glasgow and in 2000-2003 when the participants were middle-aged or older adults. These questionnaires asked about the participants’ medical history, present health, lifestyle and family background. We will also be storing data already obtained by linking the participants’ details to national records giving details of any cancer diagnoses, whether they left the country (meaning that we would no longer know what happens to them) and for those that have died, the date and cause of their death. For a small set of the participants, we will also store routinely collected mammograph data. These linked data go up to 2017.
The questionnaire data and the linked data to 2017 have already been collected and there will be no further collection of data specifically for the study. However, we do intend bring the linked data up to date and to continue updating it for as long as a substantial number of participants remain living. This will be subject to successful applications to the NHS Digital Data Access request Service (DARS) in England and the Public Benefit and Privacy Panel (PBPP) In Scotland.Research programme
The Glasgow Students Study would be used primarily by researchers in the Medical Research Council’s Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol (the IEU; https://www.bristol.ac.uk/integrative-epidemiology/) and in the Bristol Medical School, although if permitted, we would also wish to share selected, de-anonymised data with external researchers under the strict conditions described elsewhere in this form. It is one of several “legacy” cohorts managed by the IEU. The IEU is a major international centre of research into the causes of disease and the methods used to establish those causes. The long time that has passed since the collection of the first questionnaire data in the Glasgow Students Study makes it a rare and valuable resource for studying associations between potential risk factors in early adulthood and the diseases of middle and old age. Having some of the same risk factors measured both in early adulthood and in middle or old age is a particularly valuable feature of the cohort as is its unusually large size (about 16,000 people) for a legacy cohort. The breadth of potential risk factors and health outcomes measured means that the study has the potential to address numerous questions in health research.
Research database title
Glasgow Students Study
Establishment organisation
University of Bristol
Establishment organisation address
Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol
First Floor, 5 Tyndall Avenue
BS8 1UD