Children of the 90s help fight coronavirus

3 June 2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK in March, Bristol’s world leading health study, the Children of the 90s was in a unique position. It could use its decades’ worth of mental and physical health data from 14,000 Bristol-born families to provide important context and then to help answer many critical public health questions.

Supported by the Elizabeth Backwell Institute, it set up a COVID-19 research study using online questionnaires to track how the virus and lockdown have affected the three generations within its study: the original ‘babies’ (now 27-29 years), their parents (50-70 years) and the new ‘children of the Children of the 90s’ (0-13 years).

With all this latest COVID-19 health data alongside the historical data, Children of the 90s researchers hope to answer questions pertinent to the agenda of government policymakers, helping them to make decisions about changes to our lives and health outcomes.

So far two questionnaires have been launched - the latest launched on 26 May – and researchers need as many Children of the 90s participants as possible to take part, regardless of whether they did the first questionnaire.

The new questionnaire hopes to find out how many people have had COVID-19 without severity ie. symptom-free, how the virus spreads in the community, who is most at risk to COVID-19 and why and who is suffering most with mental health issues caused by lockdown.

Professor Nic Timpson, Principal Investigator explained: “Children of the 90s is in a unique position because we have such a large cohort of people who are actively part of the study and who represent groups with differing clinical risk. We’ve got health data going back nearly 30 years and this coupled with our most recent questionnaires will allow us to better understand the population dynamics of the disease and the fallout from our attempts to stop it.”

The first questionnaire had over 6,800 participants complete it, and the data has already played a role in informing government policy on the virus.

The launch of the new COVID-19 questionnaire was well received in local media, with coverage in the following places:

May 2020	Bristol Live	6,000 people take part in 'groundbreaking' Bristol coronavirus study
May 2020	Somerset Live	How a Somerset mum is helping others in 'vital' study to understand coronavirus and its impact
Apr 2020	BBC Radio Bristol	Professor Nic Timpson discusses our COVID-19 questionnaire with Ali Vowles (YouTube)
Apr 2020	BBC Points West (video)	Professor Nic Timpson explains how our COVID-19 questionnaire will help us understand more about the outbreak (YouTube)
Apr 2020	BBC Online	Coronavirus: Children of the 90s team to study outbreak

Further information

Find out more: Children of the 90s calls on participants to help fight Coronavirus

Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) information for researchers