Longest running study of human cognition reveals there’s more to ageing than our genes

We all want to stay young forever but Old Father Time gets us all in the end – or does he? In the BBC programme ‘How to Stay Young’, meet a very special group of people brought together by the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE): the Lothian Birth Cohort.

This ragtag band of 80 somethings shows us that there’s more to ageing than the genes we were born with.

About the Lothian Birth Cohort

Scotland is home to the longest study of human cognition in the world, the Lothian Birth Cohort (LBC), which is part of CCACE at the University of Edinburgh.

The LBC features data from 33,536 men and 32,229 women born in Scotland in 1936. They took a validated childhood intelligence test at age 11 and could be linked to cause of death data up to December 2015.