UK Biobank is an intensively characterised prospective cohort of 500,000 adults aged 40-69 years when recruited between 2006 and 2010. The study was established to enable researchers worldwide to undertake health-related research in the public interest. The existence of such a large, detailed prospective cohort with a high degree of participant engagement enabled its rapid repurposing for coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Individual conditions have been identified as risk factors for dementia; however, it is important to consider the role of multimorbidity, as conditions often co-occur.
Objective: To investigate whether multimorbidity is associated with incident dementia and whether associations vary by different clusters of disease and genetic risk for dementia.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This population-based prospective cohort study used data from the UK Biobank cohort, with baseline data collected between 2006 and 2010 and with up to 15 years of follow-up.
Background: The Amyloid/Tau/Neurodegeneration (ATN) framework has been proposed as a means of evidencing the biological state of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Predicting ATN status in pre-dementia individuals therefore provides an important opportunity for targeted recruitment into AD interventional studies. We investigated the extent to which ATN-defined biomarker status can be predicted by known AD risk factors as well as vascular-related composite risk scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Dementias Platform UK Data Portal is a data repository facilitating access to data for 3 370 929 individuals in 42 cohorts. The Data Portal is an end-to-end data management solution providing a secure, fully auditable, remote access environment for the analysis of cohort data. All projects utilising the data are by default collaborations with the cohort research teams generating the data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Prospective studies reporting associations between cognitive performance and subsequent incident dementia have been subject to attrition bias. Furthermore, the extent to which established risk factors account for such associations requires further elucidation.
Methods: We used UK Biobank baseline cognitive data (n ≤ 488,130) and electronically linked hospital inpatient and death records during three- to eight-year follow-up, to estimate risk of total dementia (n = 1051), Alzheimer's disease (n = 352), and vascular dementia (n = 169) according to four brief cognitive tasks, with/without adjustment for constitutional and modifiable risk factors.
Evidence suggests that lifestyle factors, e.g. physical activity, moderate the manifestation of genetic susceptibility to obesity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To extend previous literature that suggests higher IQ in youth is associated with living longer. Previous studies have been unable to assess reliably whether the effect differs across sexes and ages of death, and whether the effect is graded across different levels of IQ.
Methods: We test IQ-survival associations in 94% of the near-entire population born in Scotland in 1936 who took an IQ test at age 11 (n = 70,805) and were traced in a 68-year follow-up.
To examine the association between intelligence measured in childhood and leading causes of death in men and women over the life course. Prospective cohort study based on a whole population of participants born in Scotland in 1936 and linked to mortality data across 68 years of follow-up. Scotland.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe association between childhood body weight and adult health has been little-examined, and findings are inconsistent.In a representative sample of the Scottish nation (the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947), we examined the association between body mass index measured at 11 years of age and future cause-specific mortality by age 77 years. In this cohort study, a maximum of 67 years of follow-up of 3839 study members gave rise to 1568 deaths (758 from cardiovascular disease, 610 from any malignancy).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough it has been well documented that elevated body weight in middle- and older-aged populations is associated with multiple morbidities, the influence of childhood body weight on health endpoints other than coronary heart disease is not well understood. Accordingly, using a subsample of 4,620 participants (2,288 women) from the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947, we examined the association between body mass index measured at 11 years of age and future risk of 9 independent health endpoints as ascertained from national hospital admissions and cancer registers until 2014 (up to age 77 years). Although there was some evidence of a relationship between elevated childhood body mass index and higher rates of peripheral vascular disease (per each 1-standard deviation increase in body mass index, hazard ratio = 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Social participation in middle and older age is associated with lower mortality risk across many prospective cohort studies. However, there is a paucity of evidence on social participation in youth in relation to mortality, which could help inform an understanding of the origin of the association and give credence to causality. The present study investigates the relation of early-life club membership-a proxy measure of social participation-with mortality risk in older age in a nationally representative sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genetic influence on the association between contemporaneously measured intelligence and academic achievement in childhood was examined in nationally representative cohorts from England and The Netherlands using a whole population indirect twin design, including singleton data. We identified 1,056 same-sex (SS) and 495 opposite-sex (OS) twin pairs among 174,098 British 11 year-olds with test scores from 2004, and, 785 SS and 327 OS twin pairs among 120,995 Dutch schoolchildren, aged 8, 10 or 12 years, with assessments from 1994 to 2002. The estimate of intelligence heritability was large in both cohorts, consistent with previous studies (h (2) = 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: In a prospective cohort study the authors examined associations between childhood intelligence at age 11 and inflammatory and hemostatic biomarkers in middle age.
Method: Participants were 9,377 men and women born in the United Kingdom in March 1958, and whose blood plasma samples at age 45 years were analyzed for levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), D-dimer, fibrinogen, tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA) antigen, and von Willebrand factor (VWF). Sex-adjusted linear regression models tested cognition-blood biomarker associations, with and without adjustment for potential confounding by parental socioeconomic status and potential mediation by cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors at midlife.
Background: A number of prospective cohort studies have examined the association between intelligence in childhood or youth and life expectancy in adulthood; however, the effect size of this association is yet to be quantified and previous reviews require updating.
Methods: The systematic review included an electronic search of EMBASE, MEDLINE and PSYCHINFO databases. This yielded 16 unrelated studies that met inclusion criteria, comprising 22,453 deaths among 1,107,022 participants.
We examined the prospective association between cognitive ability in early adulthood and erythrocyte sedimentation rate, a marker of inflammation, in middle age. Participants were 4256 male Vietnam era US veterans. Data on cognitive ability, assessed by the Army General Technical Test, ethnicity, and place of service were extracted from enlistment files.
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