The Million Women Study

The Million Women Study is the world’s largest study of women’s health, with over 1.3 million UK participants. For each participant we have access to a wealth of information on health-related behaviours, and other lifestyle factors from over 20-years follow-up through electronic health records for morbidity, cancer outcomes, and death. With ~200,000 incident cancers to date, this project builds on previous Oxford work on cancer aetiology, to develop accurate, population-based risk stratification tools for site-specific cancers, with the aim of informing targeted prevention and/or screening strategies. The study represents a particularly unique resource for breast cancer research and planned linkages to mammographic imaging data breast screening history and blood samples provide unprecedented opportunities for multidisciplinary approaches to the development and validation of machine learning based algorithms for prediction of invasive breast cancer, both in the general population, and in women with pre-invasive disease.