Last month, I travelled to a small industrial estate a few kilometres outside Reading, where I spent three hours undergoing a series of medical tests. I am not ill, and I am not aware of any serious underlying health conditions or significant risk factors that I should be concerned about. I was not being treated, instead I was participating in a medical research project, that aims to gather data about the health of a large number of people over a lengthy period of time.
Biobank was established in the UK between 2006 and 2010 and has a cohort of just over half-a-million volunteers, who were aged between 40 and 69 when they joined the project. This makes it the largest and most detailed research study that traces the long-term health outcomes for people in the Western world, with vast amounts of data on biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors that impact the development of a range of diseases and health conditions. I joined in 2009, and at the outset I went through a series of tests to get baseline data on my health. These included blood and urine samples, measures of blood pressure, my weight and height, a series of online cognitive tests – the sorts of memory and pattern recognition exercises that teenagers now do for standardised testing – together with some lifestyle questions about diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and my own perceptions of my degree of social interaction or loneliness, and my levels of happiness. Since then I have been asked several times to complete online questionnaires on various aspects of my health and my sense of well-being, and on a couple of occasions I have also worn a wristband containing a small tracking device for a week, which measured my movement and activity.
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