Understanding Society collects information about participants’ social and economic circumstances, attitudes and beliefs and it also gathers information about their health. From Wave 1 onwards participants were asked a number of questions about their general health. In Wave 2 and Wave 3 adult participants received a follow-up health assessment visit from a registered nurse. A range of bio-medical measures were collected from around 20000 adults, which included blood pressure, weight, height, waist measurement, body fat, grip strength and lung function. Blood samples were also taken at these visits and frozen for future research. A number of biomarkers have now been extracted from the blood which measure major illnesses in the UK as well as being markers of key physiological systems. A genome wide scan has been conducted on DNA samples from approximately 10000 people, which enables us to examine gene-environment interactions for health and social phenomena. Methylation profiling has been conducted on DNA samples from approximately 1200 individuals from the British Household Panel Survey component of Understanding Society. This is particular important to advance understanding of how people’s social, economic and physical environments over their life time influence their biological processes by altering how their genes work. The health data can be linked to the main survey allowing for a rich set of information on a range of topics.

For the genetic and epigenetic data DNA was extracted from a venous blood sample collected by nurses in Waves 2 and 3, as part of the Understanding Society study.