Generation Scotland:NextGenScot will recruit 40,000 people—including younger relatives of existing participants—to create the UK’s largest multi-generational health study. The project transforms a one-time snapshot of adults into a long-term, life-course study that tracks families across generations. This matters because most large health studies look at individuals at a single point in time, making it hard to untangle how genetic inheritance, childhood environment, and adult lifestyle combine to shape disease risk. Without multi-generational data, researchers cannot distinguish between effects passed down through DNA and those transmitted through family habits or social circumstances. If successful, NextGenScot will provide an open-access resource linking clinical records, biological samples, and lifestyle data from birth to death, updated annually. This could reveal why some families show resilience to conditions like heart disease or diabetes while others do not, and identify windows where early intervention might break cycles of poor health. The study is primarily a fundamental science resource—it builds the infrastructure for future discoveries rather than delivering immediate treatments. Similar longitudinal studies have underpinned breakthroughs in understanding how smoking, diet, and genetics interact to cause chronic disease.
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Generation Scotland:NextGenScot (NextGenScot) builds upon the proven success and research value of Generation Scotland (GS). We will extend the reach and relevance of GS through recruitment of additional members and younger relatives of current participants. Our vision is to transform GS from a cross-sectional, adult-only study into a longitudinal, multi-generational, life-course study that can address how genetic factors and environmental exposures influence disease risk, resilience and outcome. As for GS, we will: - engage with participants to shape the study objectives and seek broad consent for medically-relevant academic and commercial research, - seek consent to recontact for participation in follow-on enhancement studies, our proven mechanism to enrich the baseline data, - actively facilitate hypothesis and data-driven science by research users, openly sharing our research findings. NextGenScot expands GS to create an enhanced resource of scale (n=40,000), depth and rich annotation through: - self-report and serial remote data capture of health and lifestyle information; - e-HR linkage (from ‘birth-to-death’, updated annually); and - biological samples (collected at recruitment and longitudinally). NextGenScot would be the UK’s largest multi-generation study of clinical, biochemical, genetic, epigenetic and environmental health determinants, allowing estimation and determination of transgenerational effects (social, environmental and genetic) on disease risk and resilience.
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