Research project Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study - UBCoS Multigen
The Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study (UBCoS Multigen) offers a unique opportunity to explore several issues highly relevant for health equity research.
The Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study was established in 2004 at the Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS), since 2018 part of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University. UBCoS Multigen explores several issues highly relevant for health equity research, with its unique opportunity to apply a life-course approach to analysis in a cohort with detailed biological and social data stretching from birth to old age, and also in extending the transgenerational perspective to more than two successive generations.
The study is unique in investigating intergenerational effects as "forward in time" processes, starting at the beginning of the last century (i.e. well before any of the routine registers were in place).
For more information about the background and study aims, please see
The Uppsala studies on developmental origins of health and disease
Reference to free full text of Koupil (2007):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2007.01799.x
Project description
Health inequalities and social determinants of health are a cause of much concern in all societies today. Within this project, we hope to shed light upon some very specific mechanisms how health inequalities are formed over the life-course and regenerated in each new generation.
The Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study (UBCoS Multigen)
The aim of UBCoS Multigen has been to investigate life course and intergenerational determinants of social inequalities in health, with the main research aims:
The main research aims are to:
- Address questions of the extent to which and the mechanisms whereby social advantage and disadvantage are transmitted from one generation to the next, giving rise to continuity in social disadvantage both over the life cycle and across generations.
- Explore how early social and biological factors, especially those related to cardiovascular risk, are transmitted from the parent generation to offspring generation(s).
- Try to integrate the understanding of broader social mechanisms with the understanding of disease specific aetiology to answer the question of how, and to what extent, health inequalities are reproduced into each new generation.
Study design
The Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study (UBCoS) started in 2005, with the opportunity to combine existing data on a representative and well-defined cohort of 14,192 males and females born in Uppsala from 1915-1929 (the Uppsala Birth Cohort: UBCoS) with information on descendants of the original cohort members obtained from routine registers.
The Generations: The UBCoS Multigen Cohort
In 2007-2011, the UBCoS Multigen cohort was extended by additional data collection in school archives and records from Census 1930 and the period of follow-up extended till end of year 2009.
Intergenerational associations can be currently investigated in more than 140,000 study subjects from families spanning up to five generations, including the 14,192 original cohort members, their 22,559 children, 38,771 grandchildren and 25,471 great grandchildren born up to 2009.
Project members
Project managers
Ilona Grünberger
Professor
Publications
More about this project
The UBCoS Multigen is located at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University
The UBCoS Multigen project is a collaboration between several academic institutions. It was established in 2005 at Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS), a research centre affiliated to both Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet. The UBCoS Multigen is located at the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University
The Principal Investigator for UBCoS multigen is Ilona Koupil, Professor of Health Equity Studies at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University.