All participants provided consent for follow-up through linkage to their health-related records. As of May 2018, there were over 14,000 deaths, 79,000 participants with cancer diagnoses, and 400,000 participants with at least one hospital admission. Considerable efforts are now underway to incorporate data from a range of other national datasets including primary care, screening programmes, and disease-specific registries, as well as asking participants directly about health-related outcomes through online questionnaires (see Extended Data Table 1). Efforts are also underway to develop scalable approaches that can characterize in detail different health outcomes by cross-referencing multiple sources of coded clinical information13.
