King's College London

The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) is one of the leading twin studies in the world. It has followed twins born in England and Wales throughout their childhood, adolescence and into early adulthood. The funding from the MRC for the next five years will mean that TEDS, the only longitudinal twin birth cohort in the UK, will have received continuous funding for 30 years.

Set up in 1995 by Professor Robert Plomin, Professor Judy Dunn and Professor Sir Michael Rutter, TEDS' main goal is to gain better insights into the roles of genes and the environment in shaping who we are. The pioneering project has garnered important insights into genetic influences on maths and reading ability, intelligence and autism. The study offers an outstanding resource for investigating cognitive and behavioural development across childhood and early adulthood and actively fosters scientific collaborations.

This new grant sees the transition to the incoming Director of TEDS, Professor Thalia Eley.

This successful grant renewal from the Medical Research Council will fund ongoing salaries of the core TEDS staff, all of whom have been with the study for between 15 and 25 years. The renewal brings with it a focus on mental health, and new posts needed to enable three workstreams:

• mental health assessment focussed on anxiety and depressive disorders
• medical record linkage (in collaboration with the BRC, ALSPAC and the TwinsUK teams)
• ongoing recruitment and assessment of the Children of TEDS

TEDS recruited over 16,000 twin-pairs born between 1994 and 1996 in England and Wales through national birth records. More than 10,000 of these families are still engaged and help the study’s research by completing questionnaires and taking part in interviews about different environmental and individual factors that might have been influencing them throughout their lives. TEDS has also collected DNA samples from 12,500 twins and are using them together with the rest of the data to better understand how genes affect abilities and behaviours. In addition, many of the twins who became parents have signed up for a complementary study CoTEDS (Children of TEDS) looking at the development of TEDS twins’ children. CoTEDS is the world’s first ever twin study including information of both twin parents and their offspring from birth.

TEDS was and still is a representative sample of the population in England and Wales.

TEDS data have contributed to over 400 papers in the fields of cognition, school achievement, home and school environment, health and wellbeing, personality, and mental health. Over 140 researchers from 50 research institutions (as per 2019 publication) have collaborated with IoPPN in interdisciplinary investigations using TEDS data.

http://www.teds.ac.uk/