Cohort Profile: Our Future Health

electronic health records; surveys and questionnaires; population health Why was the cohort set up?Our Future Health is a new UK-wide prospective cohort supported by the UK Government, industry, and charity sectors (Figure 1).Our objective is to recruit 5 million adult residents of the UK to facilitate aetiologic and translational research.This research will enable everyone to live longer, healthier lives by accelerating the discovery and testing of better ways to prevent, detect, and treat diseases.Our Future Health also aims to recruit a diverse cohort that reflects the UK population.Ethically, it is important that Key Features Our Future Health is the UK's largest health research programme with an ambition to recruit 5 million UK-resident adult participants into a prospective cohort study. Our mission is to help everyone live longer, healthier lives through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to the prevention, earlier detection, and treatment of diseases. Recruitment opened in October 2022.By June 2025, 2.4 million participants had consented, 1.8 million had completed the baseline questionnaire, 1.3 million had been linked to electronic health records, and 1.4 million had completed an in-person appointment to donate health metrics and blood. Genotyping is conducted using a 700 000-variant custom array that is optimized for multi-ethnic imputation and has up-to-date disease-, phenotype-, blood type-, and pharmacogenomic-associated variants. The cohort includes >600 000 people aged 18-40 years, facilitating research into diseases that disproportionately affect younger people, including obesity, mental health disorders, and addiction, and 900 000 people aged >60 years, enabling research into vascular dementia, Alzheimer's, and ageing. Our Future Health will catalyse translational research by facilitating access to stored biosamples and by enabling re-contact studies and trials with participants selectively invited based on demographics, phenotypes, and disease risks.