research
U.K. Biobank hits its latest milestone with brain, heart, & organ scans
The U.K. Biobank, a massive repository of people's health information available to researchers around the world, unveiled its latest milestone this week, with scans from 100,000 participants now included. The imaging arm of the Biobank features scans of people's brains, hearts and other organs, blood vessels, bones, and joints.
The Biobank has been accumulating more and more data from 500,000 volunteers over two decades, with deidentified details about participants' genomes, health issues, and lifestyles available for researchers to comb through to find different connections between genetics and disease, for example. The Biobank has been adding imaging data from select participants over the past 10 years, and just recently hit the target of having scans from 100,000 volunteers completed, offering a huge trove of data to academic and industry researchers.
Scientists said that the scans add to the depth of the information available in the Biobank and will allow researchers to track patterns of disease — how early changes in the brain, for example, can signal future dementia cases, or what types of fat accumulation leave people most at risk for heart disease. A second phase of the imaging project, which started in 2022, aims to re-scan 60,000 of the participants at least two years after their initial scans, which will allow researchers to track changes in people's bodies over time.
"With a billion images from 100,000 U.K. Biobank volunteers, researchers now have an incredible window into the body," Naomi Allen, the Biobank's chief scientist, told reporters. "Researchers can study how we age and how diseases develop in stunning detail and at massive scale." — Andrew Joseph
potent quotable
On what might stop somebody from seeking addiction treatment
"Most of these treatments are ran by white people, and they do discriminate, and there's still racism behind these walls. … I experienced discrimination … 'Cause of how big I am, my weight, how dark I am, and I'm black. I felt all three at once."
That's a comment from a Black participant of a new study in JAMA Network Open that included interviews with 57 people with moderate-to-severe opioid use disorder about the factors that may stop them from seeking treatment after an emergency department visit. The qualitative study was published less than a month after previous research in the same journal found that Black and Hispanic people are "significantly less likely" to receive buprenorphine or naltrexone to treat opioid addiction. In the latest study, stigma, uncertainty on navigating the system, mental health issues, and logistical problems like transportation and insurance were key trends. Black and Hispanic participants particularly mentioned experiences of racism and mistrust.
No comments