Population data resource

The UK Biobank initiative (UKBB) is a prospective epidemiology resource that contains a vast portfolio of behavioral and demographic assessments, medical and cognitive measures, as well as biological samples from a large cohort. ~500,000 participants were recruited across the United Kingdom⁸⁰. This openly accessible population dataset aims to provide multimodal brain-imaging for ~100,000 individuals to be completed in 2022⁷⁸. The present study focused on 9,939 participants who provided T1-weighted structural brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), comprising 48% males and 52% females. These individuals were all in middle-age, ages 40 to 69 years at the time of recruitment (mean = 55 years, SD = 7.5 years). All participants were uniformly assessed and brain-scanned at the same scanning facility (i.e., Cheadle). To ensure comparability and reproducibility with other and future UKBB studies, we relied on the data preprocessing pipelines from FMRIB Oxford^77,78. The present analyses were conducted under UKBB application number 23827. All participants provided informed consent to participate (http://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/crystal/field.cgi?id=200).

Our present study co-analyzed a set of 40 behavioral indicators (Supplementary Data 1) provided by the UKBB resource (Table 1). The 40 summary measures belonged to three different domains: (i) social (12 items), (ii) personality (15 items), and (iii) demographic (13 items). All UKBB participants were administered questions for the particular trait measures (see here for further details: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/). For example, to obtain a measure of the risk-taking trait, participants were asked “Would you describe yourself as someone who takes risks?”. According to the responses given by the UKBB participants for each interview question, participants were split into two evenly sized groups that reflect the presence or absence of the particular trait: (a) not a risk-taker and (b) risk-taker. To achieve direct comparability of the equal variable encoding in the rich collection of lifestyle indices, all target items were represented with two-choice encoding⁵⁸.

UK Biobank demographic information.