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

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.

 

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.

 

The inclusive nature in trying to get to those often excluded is a big part of their stated aim:

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.

 

Given the 'limited' access to GP's, and the decreasing number of them, I am puzzled as to how they could expect this to work, at all, in any way.