Summary

Infection is important both as a cause of communicable diseases and as an exposure predisposing to non-communicable diseases. Investigating disease risk is a focus of research in large cohorts like UK Biobank. This talk discusses progress in linking cohorts to microbiological health records in the UK Health Security Agency’s Second Generation Surveillance System (SGSS) to enhance infection research. Human genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and exposome-wide association studies (ExWAS) have revealed genetic and non-genetic risk factors for COVID-19 hospitalization, demonstrating the potential for discovery across a wider variety of pathogens. Preliminary work has used GWAS to show how SGSS record linkage improves over Hospital Episode Statistics for phenotyping diverse bacterial infections, both in terms of quantity and granularity of infection diagnoses. Future directions aim to build on this progress to facilitate discovery of infection-related risk factors for disease in UK Biobank and beyond.