World’s largest body scanning study enters second stage

The UK Biobank whole-body scanning study is set to re-scan 60,000 volunteers to research how ageing affects people’s brains, hearts, abdomens and bones.

It is the world’s largest whole-body scanning study and aims to accelerate research into the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of major diseases by comparing scans taken in the previous seven years. The comparisons could be vital for assessing diseases that tend to develop later in life, such as cardiovascular or neurodegenerative diseases.

Since 2014, UK Biobank has collected vast amounts of body-scanning data using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, X-ray and dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), with the aim of imaging 100,000 participants.

Professor Sir Rory Collins, Chief Executive and Principal Investigator of UK Biobank, said: “Most large studies typically scan just a single body part of a few thousand people, so this project is truly unique…not only are we working on a vastly bigger scale, but we record images of multiple parts of each person’s body, so you can study the whole person and see how it all relates.”

Body-scanning study could lead to early therapeutic interventions

Scientists can cross-reference the imaging data with existing health and genetic data in UK Biobank to understand the mechanisms by which diseases change over time. In the case of dementia, seeing how changes to the brain’s structure and function affect the risk of disease could enable pre-symptomatic diagnoses that lead to earlier therapeutic interventions.

Participants undergo five hours of scans to collect the data, with different areas of the body imaged at the same time. UK Biobank’s imaging study includes MRI scans of the brain, heart and abdomen, along with DEXA measures of bone density and ultrasound scans of carotid arteries.

These unique data will be made available to approved researchers around the world, facilitating invaluable collaborative research comparing baseline and repeat-imaging data. The study has already led to the development of methods that can predict a person’s genetic risk of developing a wide range of conditions.

Professor Paul Matthews, Chair of the UK Biobank Imaging Working Group, and Head of the Department of Brain Sciences and UK Dementia Research Institute Centre at Imperial College Londo, added: “UK Biobank’s biomedical database is already the most comprehensive database in the world for scientific and health related research. The collection of a repeat set of whole-body scans on such a large scale will enable many more fundamental discoveries, better understanding of early disease stages and their diagnosis, and support the development of new treatments for diseases of mid-to-later life.”