Ageing body scans to help understanding of why diseases occur

The world’s largest human imaging project is set to rescan the bodies and brains of 60,000 volunteers in the UK to find new ways of treating and preventing disease.

By investigating how bodies age, the study could help predict those more likely to develop different cancers or dementia, and it has already led to a genetic test for people born with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.

The two sets of highly-detailed MRI and bone density images for thousands of people, taken several years apart, could open up significant new possibilities for detecting and preventing diseases like dementia and heart disease.

Chief scientist Professor Naomi Allen said of the study “Researchers will be able to look at changes in our organs as we get older that will help to develop biomarkers of disease, perhaps many years before a clinical diagnosis and symptoms.

“If you combine all your genetic variation across your genome, each variation has a small effect but, taken together, some individuals have quite a large genetic risk of developing heart disease or developing different types of cancers that we simply didn’t know beforehand.”

Professor Paul Elliot, epidemiologist at Imperial College London, said the vast store of volunteers’ scans would improve understanding of how our environment and genes affect our risk of disease.

He said “It builds on the ability of the NHS to follow people up through their health records, with consent, and is a pre-eminent example of the benefits of publicly-funded research.”

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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (jacquelinevance@chadlaw.co.uk), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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