Our Future Health – a programme to enable research into the prevention, detection and treatment of multiple long term conditions

The focus of UK SPINE is on research associated with intervening in the ageing process to ultimately develop therapeutics that help treat and prevent the onset of multiple long-term conditions. For work in the area to progress, a wealth of data is needed to enable the progression of research.

Our Future Health aims to be the UK’s largest ever health research programme, collecting data that will help researchers to transform the prevention, detection and treatment of conditions such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. The programme’s goal is to recruit 5 million adult volunteers, who will complete a detailed health and lifestyle questionnaire and donate a blood sample, allowing for DNA sequencing.  As well as applying to analyse specific parts of the dataset, researchers will have the opportunity to re-contact participants on a risk-stratified basis for secondary studies.

Our Future Health is committed to building a cohort that truly reflects the UK population, so that the programme can identify differences in how diseases begin and progress in men and women from different backgrounds. By ensuring that a diverse range of people participate in Our Future Health, the programme will help researchers to make discoveries that benefit everyone.

Discussions at the recent UK SPINE conference highlighted the importance of data, in particular from diverse sources, for the advancement of geroscience research. In the search for and development of therapeutics that will impact healthspan, this data has the potential to enable research into clustering patterns of multiple long-term conditions, the development of biomarkers to facilitate research and endpoints for clinical trials. 

Last March we reported on the importance of ‘high quality, complete and well harmonised datasets that are representative, not only of those suffering from or at risk of ageing-related disease, but of the whole population’. Our Future Health will fulfil this need, allowing researchers access to the datasets that are critical in this area.

Our Future Health would like to hear from health researchers and administrators, about specific ways in which a population cohort study will help find new ways to tackle diseases. Please contact the UK SPINE team for more information.