A new study led by researchers at Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science has provided the first detailed picture of the health, lifestyle and disease patterns of participants in Our Future Health, a UK-wide research programme that is building the largest health data resource of its kind in the country. The study is published in Nature Medicine.

Large cohort studies like Our Future Health and UK Biobank collect health information from hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of volunteers, giving researchers the statistical power to study the causes of disease and identify people at higher risk of illness. Since recruitment began in 2022, Our Future Health has registered over 2.5 million participants, with baseline health data now available for more than 1.9 million people. It is now the largest multi-ethnic cohort study in the world, and the largest cohort of young adults, working-age adults, and people aged over 60. Our Future Health aims to eventually recruit five million UK adults, roughly 10% of the UK's adult population.

To assess how representative and useful this new resource is for health research, the researchers compared Our Future Health participants' characteristics, lifestyles and disease patterns against national surveys, official statistics, and other major biobanks, including UK Biobank.

Key findings: 

• Our Future Health's sociodemographic makeup broadly reflects the UK population, though, as with other volunteer cohorts such as UK Biobank, it includes a higher proportion of women (57% vs 43% nationally) and under-represents the most socioeconomically deprived communities (13% vs 20% nationally) and, to a lesser extent, some minority ethnic groups and younger adults;
• Because of its large scale, Our Future Health still provides substantial numbers of participants from under-represented groups in absolute terms: for example, it includes over 40,000 young adults aged 18–39 who identify as Asian British or another Asian background, more than any existing UK cohort;
• Prevalence of self-reported health conditions in Our Future Health closely tracked patterns seen in UK Biobank, and associations between health conditions and known clinical risk factors, such as links between hypertension and cardiovascular disease, or smoking and respiratory disease, closely replicated those found in UK Biobank;
• Several conditions, particularly mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, were reported more frequently in Our Future Health than in national survey estimates, while lung cancer prevalence was consistently lower than national figures across all age groups and both sexes;
• For rarer conditions, the scale of Our Future Health is already yielding substantially larger case numbers than UK Biobank, for example, 172 people with cystic fibrosis, compared with 25 in UK Biobank, and 668 people with myasthenia gravis, compared with 266 in UK Biobank.

Vincent Straub, DPhil candidate at Oxford Population Health’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and first author of the study, said: ‘Our Future Health is already large enough to give researchers meaningful numbers of participants for a range of conditions but more data on underserved groups needs to be collected. Showing that its disease patterns broadly match what we see in national surveys and established cohorts like UK Biobank gives us confidence in the quality of the data, while also flagging where we need to be careful about how representative it is.’

Melinda Mills, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at Oxford Population Health and the study's co-corresponding author, added: ‘As Our Future Health continues to grow towards its goal of five million participants, it has real potential to transform UK health research, particularly for under-served populations and rarer diseases. This assessment gives the research community an early, transparent picture of the cohort's strengths and current gaps, so people can use the data responsibly as recruitment continues.’

Dr Raghib Ali, Chief Executive of Our Future Health, said, ‘The research shows that Our Future Health is much more representative than previous large cohorts, closely reflecting the UK population, both in demographics, health and risk factor status. This, along with our scale, means that Our Future Health is uniquely valuable, helping researchers answer the biggest questions in health and disease in all types of people in the UK, so that everyone can benefit from that research and live longer and healthier lives.’