UK: Millions of invitations go out this autumn for UK’s largest health research programme

C

CRG

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/mill...mn-for-uks-largest-health-research-programme/


Our Future Health | 24.10.22

Over three million letters are being sent out this autumn inviting members of the public to join Our Future Health, a major new health research programme designed to help develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases.

Eventually up to five million people will have the opportunity to join Our Future Health over the next few years, which will make it the UK’s largest ever health research programme open to all UK adults.

By analysing health data and blood samples from millions of volunteers who join the programme, researchers could unlock new ways to detect diseases earlier when they can be treated more easily, and more accurately predict who is at higher risk of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, dementia and stroke.

A recent survey* of over 2,700 UK adults commissioned by the programme found that 75% of people agreed that taking part in Our Future Health could lead to better medical treatments and 78% agreed that taking part could lead to better ways to detect diseases early.

Volunteers joining the research programme will be given the option in the future to receive feedback about their health, including their risk of common diseases, based on their health data and analysis of their DNA. They will also be offered the results from blood pressure and cholesterol measurements. The survey* found that almost 80% of people would be interested in receiving feedback about their risk of preventable health conditions based on their genetics.

More at link. This will run in parallel with the UK Biobank and the two projects are asking those enrolled in the Biobank not to become OFH volnteers to avoid possible conflation of data.
 
For all their discussion around inclusion this will exclude a lot of very ill people including severe ME/CFS patients.

....complete a questionnaire and book an appointment to provide a small blood sample and have some physical measurements taken.
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CRG said:
As with UK Biobank the objective is not to look at (necessarily) currently ill people but to track health over time, so the key thing is to recruit and process as many people as possible within the allocated resources.
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The inclusive nature in trying to get to those often excluded is a big part of their stated aim:

Some people have previously been under-represented in health research, including people from Black, Asian and other ethnic backgrounds and people with lower incomes. The Our Future Health programme is aiming for 5 million volunteers who truly reflect the UK population.
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It can't truly reflect the UK population if its ignoring 100s of thousands of bed ridden people. It represents those well enough to participate while ignoring those who aren't, which is the historical problem. Just another talk the talk about inclusion without walking the walk.
 
I have received 2 letters inviting me to join this, this year.
They say the letters aren't targeted but hmm.........seems a bit coincidental considering my recent health episodes.
Our Future Health:
"Our Future Health aims to be the UK’s largest ever health research programme. It is designed to help everyone live longer and healthier lives through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection, and treatment of diseases."

Our research mission – Our Future Health

Their research protocol is here:
Protocol-V6.0-28FEB2025-2.pdf

1.1. Overall aims

The overarching objective of Our Future Health is to help people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlier detection and improved treatment of diseases. The Our Future Health research programme will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools, to help identify and treat diseases early when outcomes are usually better. To achieve these objectives, we will recruit up to 5 million adults from across the UK to create a diverse and inclusive cohort of people who have consented to participate in the research. In addition to being asked for permission to link their personal health data to other health-relevant data, participants will be asked to provide biological samples and complete questionnaires on recruitment; agree to re-contact for ongoing biological sampling and questionnaires and consider taking part in further research studies; and agree to being offered personal health information arising from the research. The specific aims are presented below.

• Specific Aim 1: Build a resource linking multiple sources of health and health-relevant information, including genetic data, on millions of people in the UK, to facilitate basic discovery research by academic and commercial researchers on early indicators of disease

• Specific Aim 2: Analyse the data in the resource to estimate personal disease risk information for participants, based on genetic and non-genetic information, and offer this estimated personal health information to participants

• Specific Aim 3: Re-contact sub-groups of participants generally for additional samples, and additional data collection including linkage to digital data sources

• Specific Aim 4: Re-contact participants on a risk-stratified basis (i.e. recall-by genotype/phenotype or sociodemographic characteristics) over time specifically to enable secondary studies by academic and commercial researchers that are greatly enhanced by being able to identify highly enriched sub-populations/sub-cohorts of participants

Building this large resource with linkage, feedback and re-contact will facilitate a new generation of discovery and translational research that will advance the development and testing of early diagnostic technologies and preventive (or ‘personalised precision health’) interventions.
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I'm kind of surprised I haven't, as I did the ONS Covid survey for its entire duration and still submit a monthly questionnaire on accessing health services. I seem to be on the general invite list for government funded population stuff.
 
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