Cohort Profile: The Whitehall II study

Abstract

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.