Biobank

Continuing my read of the biography at reference 2, last noticed at reference 1, I digressed to the Biobank, a large and important statistical resource of which I had not previously heard. A sample of around 500,000 people which comes with all kinds of demographic and health data. Stuff like alcohol and tobacco usage. And rolling forward from the time of sampling, there is linkage to vital events, to cancer events and to other data. A lot of which seems to come from the people at reference 5. Some of 190 odd data items involved are listed in the snap above, around two thirds of which appear to be to do with spells in hospitals.

The sample was created between 2006 and 2010 by inviting all nine million or so people of middle years living within 25 miles of one of the 22 assessment centres scattered across the UK. The assessment centres were mostly large cities like Bristol, Leeds and Edinburgh, so the 500,000 who accepted the invitation would have been mostly people living in towns or cities, although I have yet to find any analysis of the urban-rural divide - perhaps not thought important for the purposes of this work. Or perhaps too expensive - given all the travel time - to deal with.

I have not yet found a general reader summary of the operation, neither of the taking of the sample nor of the data available for sample members. No soft box models of the sort favoured when I used to know about databases, the sort of thing turned up by Bing above.

But I have found the paper at reference 4 which compared the Biobank sample with the population at large, where the story seems to be that the sample is not bad, but women, people who are older, people who are better off and people who have healthy lifestyles are overrepresented. Something which in the trade is known as the healthy volunteer bias. Notwithstanding, if your are looking for exposure-disorder linkages in general, we have a good resource here.

From there I hopped to NHS Digital, of references 5 and 6, but to get a handle on what they do, Wikipedia seemed to do a better job at reference 7 than the official web sites. It also revealed that Mr. Hancock thought that something called NHSX of reference 8 was needed to keep an eye on them, just to be on the safe side. Perhaps all self respecting organisations these days make sure that they have someone on board who is Wikipedia literate and who can discretely look after their Wikipedia entry for them.

I should have gone there for Biobank, easy enough to find after you jump over the article about biobanks in general. See reference 9.

Amazing what the odd digression turns up.

PS 1: one is reminded of how politicians and bureaucrats never tire of reorganisations, that well known patent remedy for tired organisations. Must be easy money for all those management consultants out there.

PS 2: once again impressed by the ease with which I can import data like that snapped at the beginning of this post, supplied as comma delimited text, into Microsoft's Excel. A very modest bit of formatting needed, mainly column widths, and I am up and running.

PS 3: checking my inbox later this morning, I find that I have actually been in touch with NHS Digital, thinking that they might be able to help me with a letter from some other part of the NHS empire about changing my communications preferences which I could not get to work as my smart phone was not smart enough to process QR codes. Wrong, as NHS Digital was not into that sort of digital at all. But, to be fair, their contact centre, did reply to this effect within a day or so. Unlike some contact centres which one deals with...

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/ten-years-ago.html.

Reference 2: What does Jeremy think – Suzanne Heywood – 2021.

Reference 3: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/.

Reference 4: Comparison of Sociodemographic and Health-Related Characteristics of UK Biobank Participants With Those of the General Population – Anna Fry, Thomas J Littlejohns, Cathie Sudlow, Nicola Doherty, Ligia Adamska, Tim Sprosen, Rory Collins, Naomi E Allen – 2017. Open access.

Reference 5: https://digital.nhs.uk/.

Reference 6: Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) Annual Report and Accounts 2019-20 - Presented to Parliament pursuant to Schedule 18, paragraph 12(2)(a) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 - Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 16 July 2020. The Health and Social Care Information Centre is an executive non-departmental public body created by statute, also known as NHS Digital. An outfit which I had not previously heard of and which appears to spend of the order of £500m a year.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Digital.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHSX.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Biobank.