2 Year costed extension (360G-Wellcome-093707_Z_10_C)

Recruitment into UK Biobank of 500,000 men and women aged 40-69 began in April 2007 and willbe completed by July 2010. Previous epidemiological studies have typically been characterised byrelatively small numbers of disease cases (which may yield unstable estimates due to randomvariations); inadequate measures of risk factors (which may yield systematic under-estimates ofdisease associations); inadequate measures of confounders (which often yield over- or underestimates);and/or retrospective case-control designs in which the disease may influence riskfactor levels (“reverse causality”). By contrast, in UK Biobank, extensive questionnaire data,physical measurements and biological samples have been collected from a very large number ofparticipants. During the next 5 years, major activities will involve: careful curation of theparticipants’ samples and data; repeat assessments of subsets of the cohort to allow variation inbaseline assessments to be taken into account; linkage to participants’ medical and other healthrelatedrecords to identify prevalent and incident disease; and central adjudication of suchinformation to facilitate the efficient, consistent and rapid use of the resource. UK Biobank will alsoestablish processes and systems that support controlled access to the resource so that researchgroups can exploit its value fully