The landscape of health disparities in the UK Biobank

The UK Biobank (UKB), a large-scale biomedical database that includes demographic and electronic health record data for more than half a million ethnically diverse participants, is a potentially valuable resource for the study of health disparities. However, publicly accessible databases that catalog health disparities in the UKB do not exist. We developed the UKB Health Disparities Browser with the aims of (i) facilitating the exploration of the landscape of health disparities in the UK and (ii) directing the attention to areas of disparities research that might have the greatest public health impact. Health disparities were characterized for UKB participant groups defined by age, country of residence, ethnic group, sex and socioeconomic deprivation. We defined disease cohorts for UKB participants by mapping participant International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) diagnosis codes to phenotype codes (phecodes). For each of the population attributes used to define population groups, disease percent prevalence values were computed for all groups from phecode case-control cohorts, and the magnitude of the disparities was calculated by both the difference and ratio of the range of disease prevalence values among groups to identify high- and low-prevalence disparities. We identified numerous diseases and health conditions with disparate prevalence values across population attributes, and we deployed an interactive web browser to visualize the results of our analysis: . The interactive browser includes overall and group-specific prevalence data for 1513 diseases based on a cohort of >500 000 participants from the UKB. Researchers can browse and sort by disease prevalence and prevalence differences to visualize health disparities for each of the five population attributes, and users can search for diseases of interest by disease names or codes.Database URL