Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study

Hello and welcome to Insights, the podcast from Understanding Society.

Understanding Society is a longitudinal survey that captures life in the 21st century.

Every year we ask each member of thousands of the same households across the UK about their daily lives.

Each episode of Insights looks at what researchers do with our data.

What do they find, and can it change things? I'm your host, Chris Coates, and in this episode we're looking at research using Understanding Society's biological data, which examined how some genes work differently in different people.

I'm joined by Leo Sheltwick, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex, and Radu Zabet, a reader in AI and Cancer Epigenetics at Queen Mary University of London.

So Leo, could you start for us and just tell us to begin with what is epigenetics?

So there have been a lot of studies which are now called or epigenome-wide association studies, where people compare tissues from cases and controls of various diseases or exposed and not exposed to various environmental exposures, and then they compare the epigenetic profiles of those two groups to find differences that then may be either a cause or an effect of what they're comparing.