Help Biobank to shape our future (From Stourbridge News)

Help Biobank to shape our future

10:33am Monday 30th November 2009

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THE people of Dudley, Stourbridge and Halesowen will shortly be asked to help build an important resource to improve the health of future generations; I do hope many will choose to take part.

UK Biobank will help scientists tackle a wide range of common, chronic, painful and life-threatening disorders such as heart disease and cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression, arthritis and lung and eye diseases.

The project relies on people’s altruism to take part.

In joining UK Biobank, participants attend a two-hour assessment at our centre in Temple Row where we find out about their health and lifestyle, take some body measurements and participants provide a sample of blood, urine and saliva for long term storage and analysis, including genetic.

Participants also agree to have their health followed for 30 years or more.

Overall, UK Biobank will recruit 500,000 people aged 40-65 and we hope up to 30,000 of these generous people will come up from the Dudley, Stourbridge and Birmingham area.

Letters inviting people to take part are being sent out over the course of the next eight months.

More information is available at the project’s website www.ukbiobank.ac.uk.

I do hope that many people will choose to support this important project that us backed by the NHS and some of the country’s largest medical research charities.

Rory Collins UK Biobank Principal Investigator and BHF Professor of Medicine Oxford University

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