The bodies and brains of 100,000 Britons will be scanned, measured, shared and compared, in the world’s largest medical imaging study to shed light on the onset and progression of major diseases.
The project, which launches on Thursday, will create an unprecedented library of images that capture details of volunteers’ bones, brains, arteries and hearts, alongside the distribution of fat around their midriffs.
Combined with other information already held on the participants, the stack of images – equivalent to 500 ebooks-worth of data per person – will help doctors understand how the environment, genetics, lifestyle and diet affect human health and, eventually, death.
With the haul of data to hand, researchers expect to learn more about the ways in which specific diseases trigger damage throughout the body. For example, scientists will investigate how diabetes and heart disease may trigger changes in the body that ultimately cause harm to the brain.
Researchers will scan volunteers from the 500,000 middle aged people already taking part in UK BioBank, a massive project set up in 2006 to gather medical and lifestyle data on the UK population, in sickness and in health. Participants have donated blood and tissues, had their DNA read, their lifestyles analysed, and cognitive abilities scored with online tests. Compiling the data should help scientists develop new tests for diseases in their earliest stages, and highlight factors that either protect or predispose to illness.
“These images will help us understand the risk factors that could be used to prevent future disease, just as the discovery of a link between smoking and cancer helped us change the entire prevalence of that disease,” said Paul Matthews, head of brain sciences at Imperial College, London.
Armed with the images, researchers hope to gain deeper insights into the multiple causes of frailty in old age, a state influenced by muscle and bone condition, heart and lung function, and the health of the brain. In old age, calcium loss makes the bones brittle. With thousands of images of bones from different people, researchers can learn how other common conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia and muscle weakness affect bone health.
Stephen Smith at the Oxford University Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, said that in one 30-minute session, each volunteer would have six different brain scans. Together they will provide information on the brain’s anatomy, electrical activity and the wiring of the white matter. “All of this can change with ageing and disease,” said Smith. “This is truly big data. We can learn early, possibly subtle, markers for diseases like Alzheimer’s.” Discover those, and doctors can identify people for early interventions.
Data from the project will be made available to scientists all over the world. Images of the heart, the major artery, the aorta, and others in the neck, can be compared as people age, to show how they thicken and stiffen. Other images can help doctors test hypotheses, such as whether visceral fat creates inflammation that ultimately damages neurons, leading to accelerated ageing in the brain. The promise, said Matthews, is for “new breakthroughs, faster.”
Those who volunteer for the scans do not, as routine, receive feedback about their health. But if imaging experts spot serious abnormalities in the scans, the information will be passed on to the participants so they can have further medical checks.