Version: 1.0.0 | Published: 8 Oct 2024 | Updated: 604 days ago
Documentation
Associated Media:
Description:
Our Future Health is a prospective, observational cohort study of the general adult population of the United Kingdom (UK). The programme aims to support a wide range of observational health research. We gather personal, health and lifestyle information from each participant through a self-completed baseline health questionnaire and at an in-person clinic visit. We will further link this data to other health-related data sets. Participants have also given consent for us to recontact them, for example to invite them to take part in further or repeat data collections, or other embedded studies such as clinical trials.
The Our Future Health programme is currently open to all adults (18 years and older) living in the UK. In July 2022, we started recruiting participants in England and will continue to expand across the rest of the UK. The data we’ve gathered so far (May 2026) includes genotype array data on 686,416 variants for 755,000 participants.
These data were obtained using a custom Illumina Infinium Excalibur beadchip array, designed by Our Future Health in collaboration with Illumina. The array includes variants related to a wide range of health phenotypes, blood typing, pharmacogenetics, selected copy number variants, clinically relevant variants, and a “backbone” of variants to support imputation.
An imputed genotype dataset on 159,587,100 variants and 755,000 participants is also available (May 2026). These participants are also included in the genotype array dataset.
Additionally, within this release (May 2026) genetic ancestry data and genetic kinship data have also been inferred for 755,000 participants. The genetic ancestry data was inferred by applying a Global Ancestry Estimation (GEA) workflow developed by Genomics Ltd, while for the genetic kinship data the methodology outlined in Bycraft et. al (2018) was followed.
Additionally, there are also a number of linked datasets available, including:
• Participant data, which contains information on participant sex, gender, ethnicity, month and year of birth, consent version, month and year of consent, month and year of registration, blood sample
• Self-reported baseline questionnaire data, which contains information of socio-economic, lifestyle and individual and family health
• Clinic measurements data, which includes blood pressure, height, weight, BMI, heart rate and POCT lipid profile
• Participant geographies data for all devolved nations including small area statistical zones such as LSOA, MSOA and Intermediate Zones
• Linked health records data for participants receiving care in England, including HES, ECDS, cancer registry, dispensed medicines in primary care and deaths
The data is stored in the Our Future Health Trusted Research Environment. We de-identify all participant data we gather before it’s available for use. All researchers will need to become registered researchers at Our Future Health and have an approved research study before they"re given access to the data.
We aim to collect a variety of data types from up to 5 million adult participants from across the UK. We hope to make more data types available on a quarterly basis.
Coverage
Spatial:
United Kingdom
Typical Age Range:
18-150
Follow Up:
0 - 6 Months
Provenance
Origin
Purposes:
Study
Sources:
Machine generated
Collection Situations:
Clinic
Temporal
Accrual Periodicity:
Biannual
Distribution Release Date:
27 May 2026
Start Date:
30 April 2021
End Date:
24 March 2026
Time Lag:
Other
Accessibility
Access
Access Service:
The Our Future Health Trusted Research Environment (TRE) is a highly secure
computing environment, where researchers can access the Our Future Health data
they have applied for. The TRE is subject to rules, monitoring, and strict
controls to protect the data and participants'; privacy. The
Our Future Health TRE has a range of tools available for analysing the data.
More information is available here:
https://research.ourfuturehealth.org.uk/analysing-the-data/ If you think our TRE
will not be able to meet your research needs, for example, if
you’ve developed complex software or analytical tools
that would be hard to recreate, you can apply to access the data using a
different TRE.
Access Request Cost:
Delivery Lead Time:
1-2 months
Jurisdictions:
GB-ENG
Data Controller:
Our Future Health
Usage
Data Use Limitations:
Research use only
Data Use Requirements:
- Project-specific restrictions
- Geographical restrictions
- Return to database or resource
- Time limit on use
- User-specific restriction
Resource Creators:
Our Future Health
Format and Standards
Vocabulary Encoding Schemes:
LOCAL
Conforms To:
LOCAL
Languages:
en
Formats:
pVCF, BGEN, tsv, multiple formats available
Observations
Statistical Population
Population Description
Population Size
Measured Property
Observation Date
Persons
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health, completed a questionnaire, have a good blood sample and genotype array data
755000
Count
04 October 2025