Scientists have completed the world’s largest whole body imaging project, scanning over 100,000 people from head to toe in a decade-long effort. The unprecedented study has provided researchers with 1 billion de-identified images of volunteers’ hearts, brains, abdomens, blood vessels, bones, and joints, along with medical histories and genetic data.
The UK Biobank project has already led to breakthroughs in understanding how the heart influences psychiatric disorders and predicting dozens of future diseases. The scans have also shown that no amount of moderate alcohol consumption is healthy, highlighting the importance of moderation.
Researchers can now study aging and disease development at a massive scale, providing new insights into body changes over time. The images revealed subtle differences in brain size, as small as a teaspoon of water, which could help identify people at higher risk of dementia.
The project’s findings also suggest that excessive alcohol consumption can lead to memory loss and dementia. Doctors have long used BMI to assess risk, but abdominal scans show that the same measurements can indicate radically different fat distributions, affecting heart disease risk.
UK Biobank is now re-scanning 60,000 volunteers to study brain, body, and bone changes over time. The results could transform procedures in the NHS, including automated detection of life-threatening aneurysms in blood vessels.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/15/full-body-scans-uk-biobank-project-diseases-detected-and-treated