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The West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study: ‘Health in the community’ was set up in 1986 in order to investigate the reasons for differences in health by socio-economic circumstances, gender, the place where people live, age, ethnic group and family type.

The basic design of the Study involved recruiting three cohorts (groups) of volunteers, each group born twenty years apart. Members of the oldest cohort were born around 1932, those in the middle cohort were born in 1952, and those in the youngest cohort were born in 1972. A total of 4,510 people agreed to take part, and have been followed for 20 years. The final wave of data collection was completed in 2008. This means that when the Study began (1987/8) participants were 15, 35 or 55 years old, and by the end of the Study (2007/8), participants were 35, 55 and 75 years old.
The data collected are extensive and include self-reported mental and physical health (including chronic conditions, medications, disabilities); physical measures; biomarkers; cognition; life circumstances (including employment, housing, family); health behaviours; beliefs, attitudes and values. The cohort is being followed up for mortality using linkage to national records. Any data on neurodegenerative disease are from self-reported health and / or death certificates.
A full description of the cohort profile is available in the following publication: Cohort Profile: West of Scotland 20-07 study: health in the community. International Journal of Epidemiology 2009;38:1215-23

Tracking Parkinson’s, or the PRoBaND study, is a UK-based study of Parkinson’s disease funded entirely by Parkinson’s UK.

There is a wide variation of symptoms and features of Parkinson’s driven by both genetic and external factors.  Our study aims to define and explain these variations by analysing the clinical expression of Parkinson’s in relation to genotypic variation. Tracking Parkinson’s is a multi-centre prospective longitudinal study, informed by epidemiological and biomarker data.

Participants were recruited into three categories:

  • Recent onset patients (diagnosed within the last three years) are followed up at 6-month intervals for four years, then every 18-months for a further three years.
  • Early onset (patients diagnosed before the age of 50) were followed up at one year.
  • Relatives (siblings) of the participants are followed up after three years.

Since 2012, we have been running at 70 sites across the UK.  Recruitment closed in November 2017 and our cohort consists of 2,270 people with Parkinson’s and 344 of their siblings.

NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde is the study Sponsor and the coordinating study centre is based at the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.