This month, we have approved applications from 2 research teams to analyse our participants’ data. 

It means we now have a total of 81 live studies working within our Trusted Research Environment (TRE), the secure interface where researchers can analyse our data.  

Put together, the studies aim to help prevent and protect people from developing disease, as well as improve treatment options. 

Let’s find out more about them – and how our participants’ data is helping to prevent, detect and treat disease. 

Exploring the biological drivers of disease 

Study: Using genetics to understand lifelong health and disease 

Research organisation: University of Exeter 

The researcher team is analysing the impact of our early life and biology on our health, wellbeing, and disease risk across our entire lifetimes. 

They want to understand why some people are more at risk of developing serious mental and physical illnesses than others. 

To do this, the researchers are combining de-identified genetic information from Our Future Health participants with data from their lifestyle questionnaires and health records. 

As a first step, they are looking at early life and sex differences to understand the impact of factors like birthweight, pregnancy outcomes, hormone levels, and reproductive ageing.  

They can then assess how these differences may contribute to major health problems, including heart disease, mental illness, and diabetes. 

As a second part to the study, the researchers plan to closely examine mental health conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, to explore why people who have both mental and physical illnesses often face worse health outcomes. 

If successful, the findings should lead to faster, more targeted interventions and personalised prevention programmes. 

Discovering why cancer rates are rising in young people 

Study: Risk factors across generations and their role in increasing the burden of early-onset cancers. 

Research organisation: Washington University in St Louis 

A research team in the US are hoping to answer a question that has baffled scientists in recent years. Why is the rate of cancer among young people on the rise? 

In the UK, there has been an increase in the number of young people developing 11 common cancers. A similar pattern can be seen in other developed nations. 

The research team will focus on early-onset bowel cancer, which will be used as a template for other common cancers. They will combine our data set with information from 14 other major health research programmes, to better understand risk factors at different stages of life. 

They are interested to learn how differences in environment, lifestyle, and genetic risk factors might vary between different generations.  

By analysing cancer risk exposures at different stages of life, they hope to identify key contributors. 

They will also dig into the data to better understand typical timescales between the signs and symptoms of early-onset cancers, with a view to improving diagnosis times. 

The research team hopes their work will lead to better protection and screening for those most at risk of developing common cancers. 

To see a full list of approved studies that are analysing Our Future Health’s data, visit the Health Data Research Gateway.