National Brain Health Platform
This cohort resource is developed under the National Brain Health Platform and focuses primarily on student mental health, with pain, sleep, somatic symptoms, educational stress, social resources, and multimodal deep phenotyping measured as key developmental contexts.
College student cohorts
This page describes the college student programme. The child and adolescent cohort has its own overview and data catalogue.
A university-entry cohort with 32,296 baseline students and 10,113 follow-up participants. This cohort supports research on family and socioeconomic circumstances, pre-university residential background, university transition, depression, anxiety, sleep, pain, and somatic symptoms.
A two-wave university student survey conducted during the COVID era. The survey includes 10,286 students in Wave 1 and 22,570 students in Wave 2, with 2,875 students observed in both waves. University-site identifiers are anonymized in the public display.
Freshman cohort growth
The freshman transition cohort is designed to grow each year. The next September wave is expected to include new entrants and multiple follow-up waves from previously enrolled students.
Expected new participants entering the cohort in September.
Students from prior entry waves expected to complete their first follow-up.
Students expected to contribute repeated longitudinal measurements.
32,296 newly enrolled college students in the current public cohort summary.
Demographics, family socioeconomic circumstances, pre-university residential background, university transition, social resources, lifestyle, sleep, mental health, pain, and somatic symptoms.
Study identifiers support governed follow-up linkage. Selected participants contribute clinical interviews, imaging, activity, sleep, EEG, and biological data.
10,113 respondents in the current public summary.
Repeated core outcomes plus updated living conditions, academic experience, social support, behaviours, developmental residential history, and emerging psychosocial topics.
Longitudinal linkage is available within the governed dataset. Analysis-specific linked denominators and deep-phenotyping coverage must be reported.
More than 10,000 new entrants and more than 10,000 participants in each active follow-up wave are expected in the next September cycle.
A stable longitudinal core is retained while selected modules are updated for emerging educational, social, digital, and mental-health concerns.
Additional clinical and multimodal assessments can be nested within survey waves for mechanism-focused studies.
Cohort overview
These descriptive summaries establish the scale and sampling context of each survey before subgroup comparisons or longitudinal modelling. Survey waves are ordered by collection period, and follow-up respondents are not counted as an additional independent cohort.
Counts refer to complete survey records at each collection period. The two COVID-era waves are shown separately; students appearing in both waves are not added to a unique-person total.
Blue = depression; orange = anxiety. Values are unadjusted screening prevalences and should not be interpreted as direct cohort comparisons because sampling periods and contexts differ.
Coverage describes the breadth of recruitment, not national representativeness.
Participant characteristics at initial assessment
The Freshman Transition Cohort and COVID-era Multi-university Survey used different sampling frames and questionnaire structures. Presenting them separately preserves the meaning of each measure and avoids imposing an artificial common socioeconomic classification.
Freshman Transition Cohort
Full baseline sample; follow-up participation is described in the assessment timeline rather than counted again here.
Questionnaire categories translated from the original baseline codebook.
Classified from reported county-level administrative unit names.
Descriptive geographic grouping; not a socioeconomic classification.
Complete three-component SES score available for 32,163 students.
Top ten among valid province responses.
COVID-era Multi-university Survey
The first pandemic-period survey is used for the participant profile. Wave 2 is retained in the collection timeline and longitudinal analyses, not added as a second baseline population.
Top ten among valid province responses.
Percentages are calculated among valid responses for each variable. Counts may therefore differ slightly across panels.
Measures collected
PHQ-9 depression symptoms, GAD-7 anxiety symptoms, psychological stress, structured clinical interviews in subsamples, and related help-seeking indicators.
Pain presence, pain severity, pain interference, somatic symptoms, and functional impact.
Sleep disturbance, insomnia-related measures, physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, and other lifestyle factors.
Family SES, pre-university residential context, campus environment, social support, resilience, and academic satisfaction.
Baseline and follow-up instruments are summarized in a public-facing questionnaire browser organized by measurement domain and assessment wave.
Open questionnaire catalogueDeep phenotyping
Beyond survey follow-up, the platform includes or is developing deep phenotyping modules in selected subsamples to support mechanistic studies of mental health, sleep, pain, and somatic distress.
Open deep phenotyping catalogueSCID and structured clinical characterization for psychiatric phenotyping.
fMRI and related brain measures for neural correlates of symptoms and resilience.
One-week actigraphy / physical activity data for sleep, rhythm, and daily functioning.
PSG and EEG modules for sleep architecture and neurophysiological profiles.
Microbiota data to explore gut-brain, inflammation, pain, and mental-health pathways.
Repeated measures of mental health, sleep, pain, SES, school context, support, and resilience.
Research themes
How depression, anxiety, sleep, stress, and social context change across educational transitions.
How pain, somatic symptoms, depression, anxiety, and sleep problems cluster and change over time.
How university entry, academic context, major satisfaction, and school belonging shape mental health risk.
How family SES, pre-university residential context, current living environment, and social support interact with student well-being.
How clinical interviews, fMRI, activity monitoring, PSG, EEG, and microbiota can deepen cohort findings.
Collaboration
We welcome collaborations on student mental health, pain and somatic symptoms, sleep, developmental context, educational stress, social support, resilience, and multimodal deep phenotyping. Detailed data access is handled through project-specific agreements.