This site provides information about the Access Committee for CLS Cohorts (ACCC)and guidance on how to apply for access to the samples and data held on the 1958 Birth Cohort (National Child Development Study).

The 1958 Birth Cohort resources are available to bona fide research scientists (biomedical, psychosocial, educational or ethico-legal) from anywhere in the world that have successfully applied to either the Access Committee for CLS Cohorts (ACCC) or Consortium Data Access Committee (CDAC).

The resource is used widely for research in genetic and genomic epidemiology – in particular as a platform for genetic association studies. To that end, it provides a source of subjects that have been well characterised (phenotyped) for a wide variety of quantitative complex traits and have also been carefully assessed for a wide variety of sociodemographic, socioeconomic and life style variables that are outcomes in their own right, and may be important determinants in relevant causal pathways leading to disease. It also provides a source of 'cases' and 'controls' for common binary traits.

Finally – and possibly most importantly – it provides a geographically representative sample of British people (of primarily European origin) that represents the premier source of national controls that can be used in a wide variety of genetic case-control studies. For example, the 1958BC was used as one of two sets of national controls in the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, that studied more than 12 complex diseases and was voted international 'Research Leader of the Year, 2007 in the Scientific American SciAm 50 awards. On the basis of this contribution alone, the 1958BC Biomedical Survey has already played a major role in national and international bioscience.