Cohort Profile: The Whitehall II study

The Whitehall studies have come to be closely associated with the investigation of socioeconomic differences in physical and mental illness and mortality: the social gradient.1,2 That was not the initial purpose of the first Whitehall study. Donald Reid and Geoffrey Rose set up Whitehall, in the 1960s, as a kind of British Framingham:3 ‘Framingham’ insofar as it was a longitudinal study of cardiorespiratory disease and diabetes, looking at individual risk factors for disease; ‘British’ in that it was done on the cheap—a simple screening examination with follow-up limited to deaths identified from the National Health Service Central Registry. Socioeconomic differences were initially not on the agenda. In the…

• JD
  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• HA
  Health and Safety Executive
• EA
  Economic and Social Research Institute
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• EA
  Economic and Social Research Council