What Scientists Learned Scanning The Bodies of 100,000 Brits

A massive database of medical images is offering an unprecedented window into how diseases take hold.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What Scientists learned Scanning the Bodies of one hundred thousand
Brits by Jason Gale and Ashley Furlong, read by Mike Cooper.
One morning last summer, Allison slipped off her jewelry, stepped
into a hospital gown, and laid down inside a full
body MRI scanner. As the machine issued calming instructions breathe in, hold,

(00:21):
breathe out, it captured thousands of images from her head
to her toes. A tech worker and mother of two
in her fifties, Allison, whose full name can't be shared
under participant privacy rules, had joined a nationwide health study
after spotting a flier in her local library. Her mother
had died young of cancer, and women like her of
Caribbean background were underrepresented in research and often overlooked. Signing out,

(00:45):
she says, was a way to be counted so that
there's data from people like me. What Allison didn't realize
was that she was part of one of the most
ambitious studies of human health ever undertaken. Since it launched
in two thousand and six, uk Biobank, a government back
to ev to transform medical research, has been building a
vast database on the health and lifestyles of half a

(01:05):
million people aged forty to sixty nine when they enrolled,
Plant and other biological samples are taken and physical measurements recorded.
Participants provide key information such as their education level, location,
ethnic background, and living circumstances. Crucially, they also consent to
long term tracking of their health care records. Since twenty fourteen,

(01:25):
the project has also carried out a series of full
body scans on participants, which generate more than twelve thousand
images per person. The five hour process, which scientists aim
to repeat two or more years later, includes MRIs of
the brain, heart, liver, and abdomen, dexer scans to assess
bone density and body fat, and ultrasounds of the carotid arteries.

(01:46):
With one hundred thousand participants scanned so far and more
still being invited, the study is offering scientists an unprecedented
window into how diseases take hold slowly and silently, years
before symptoms appear. Its cloud based platform is now used
by more than twenty one thousand researches across sixty countries,
including early career scientists and those in low resource settings

(02:08):
who receive free compute time. To date, the data have
fueled more than sixteen thousand scientific publications. This massive imaging
project is making the invisible visible, says Rory Collins, Principal
investigator and chief executive Officer of uk Biobank. This is
a study of the interaction of genes, environment, and lifestyle,
all of which are determinants of disease. The project has

(02:30):
produced more than one billion images, more than ten times
the size of any previous undertaking, fueling breakthroughs in everything
from artificial intelligence driven diagnostics to early disease prediction. One
of the most striking demonstrations of uk Biobank's potential came
during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Thousands of participants had undergone
brain imaging before and after the outbreak, allowing researchers to

(02:52):
study the impact of infection. They found measurable brain changes
even among people with mild COVID, including shrinkage and areas
LIGE link to smell, memory, and emotion. The findings reshaped
scientists understanding of the virus neurological toll and showed the
unique value of repeat imaging, providing not just snapshots, but
allowing scientists to observe how a disease unfolds. Uk Biobank,

(03:15):
which is funded by the government's Medical Research Council and
charities including the Welcome Trust, grew out of a realization
at the turn of the century that understanding heart attacks
or diseases such as dementia requires studying not just sick patients,
but huge numbers of healthy people. Over time. Collins and
others had seen how smaller studies could give misleading results,

(03:36):
especially for risk factors such as blood pressure. They saw
huge value in pairing genetic data with long term health tracking.
That wide angle approach has already paid off with a
better understanding of diagnosing and treating diabetes. Type one diabetes
was long thought to effect only children, and doctors assumed
that people who got the disease in middle or old
age had type two Colins says, but uk Biobank research

(03:59):
for shs showed that type one occurs at the same
rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realize that many
older adults had been misclassified and given the wrong treatment.
When combined with genetic, lifestyle and clinical data, the scans
are also helping scientists detect diseases earlier, understand how they develop,
and in some cases rethink what health risk looks like.

(04:21):
Take body fat. A person's body mass index or BME
has long been used as a rough proxy for health,
but UK biobank imaging shows that two people with the
same BMI can carry fat in radically different ways, some
in places that raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease,
others in ways that may be protective. Body mass index
is a very crude measure, Collins says the risk associated

(04:43):
with different distributions is likely to be massively different. Studies
have used uk biobank scans to spot early signs of
heart damage, liver disease, and even brain shrinkage linked to
mild alcohol use. Another study found that one in ten
middle aged people with no symptoms had a build up
of cal deposits in their abdominal altar, the largest artery
in the abdomen, a dangerous condition closely linked to heart

(05:06):
disease that often goes undiagnosed. Researchers are using AI to
mind the vast trove of data, training models to predict
diseases like Alzheimer's, or to build a digital twin of
a patient so researchers can establish a benchmark and compare
how sick or healthy a person is. As the number
of disease cases among the participants grows and more repeat
scans come online, researchers say the most transformative discoveries are

(05:30):
still to come. As Colins put it, we ain't seen
nothing yet. Allison says taking part in the research is
one of the most meaningful things she's ever done. They're
connecting things that people haven't previously even considered, She says.
It's laying the foundation for us to start seeing the
deeper connections in the body and in our lives. What
uk Biobank is revealing, scan by scan and layer by

(05:51):
layer is that disease doesn't arrive out of nowhere. It
accumulated quietly, shape by genes, environment and habits. By making
those changes visible long before symptoms appear, researchers hope to
catch illness in the act and eventually to stop it.
It's a shift not just in medicine but in mindset,
from treating disease after it strikes to understanding and potentially

(06:12):
interrupting how it takes shape in the first place.