SCIENTISTS in Southampton are at the forefront of world-leading research project to tackle a swathe of killer diseases striking middle-aged people.

The pioneering scheme launching today involves scanning the bones, hearts and brains of 100,000 people to create a blueprint for preventing illnesses and long-term conditions ranging from cancer and heart disease to Alzheimers and osteoporosis.

Now city experts say it will provide “groundbreaking” data to help save millions of lives and allow patients to better manage long-term illnesses.

The UK Biobank project involves collecting research to provide a world-leading resource also featuring key information such as patients’ health, wellbeing, genetic data and links to medical records.

The scheme has already recruited 500,000 volunteers who have been assessed and tested.

Now a £40 million grant has been released for one in five of those participants to be scanned with pioneering technology to give experts more detailed data.

Academics at Southampton University are playing a major role in the project and are leading the musculoskeletal part of the scheme.

They will scan the bones of a fifth of the participants to create a study 10 times larger than any other previous research.

They will measure bone density, osteoarthritis and fat and muscle in the body via a technique called a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) assessment.

Meanwhile experts at other centres will conduct MRI scans of the brain, heart and abdomen, while ultrasound examinations of the major arteries of the neck will also carried out.

The combined information will help scientists understand why some people are more susceptible to particular diseases.

In particular the Southampton team are looking for signs of osteoporosis, which causes thinning of the bones.

The condition is responsible for causing broken bones to half of one-in-two women and a fifth of one-in-five men aged over 50 in Britain, costing the country £3 billion each year.

Nicholas Harvey, Professor of Rheumatology and Clinical Epidemiology at the university’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit said: “It is critically important that we develop new ways to prevent and treat this devastating condition, and the UK Biobank imaging study will provide much needed opportunities for crucial future research.

“The really exciting thing is we will be able to study bone mass and determinants of osteoporosis in relation to other common chronic diseases such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, hypertension, dementia, and sarcopenia (muscle loss). This is a unique research opportunity and promises to deliver groundbreaking scientific information, which ultimately should improve our lives.”

Professor Cyrus Cooper, who helped them develop the study, said: “The intensive musculoskeletal characterisation will permit novel linkage to imaging of other systems and to the extensive existing phenotypic information, which should yield internationally important opportunities for discovery science.”

The project is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Wellcome Trust and the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

Participants have been drawn from all over the country and scanning centres will be located in Reading, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne.