ArticleInternational journal of epidemiology2024
Reweighting UK Biobank corrects for pervasive selection bias due to volunteering.
Article in International journal of epidemiology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mode Effects on Self-Reported Health Across Web-Based, Interviewer-Administered, and Nurse-Administered Modes: Population-Based Study.JMIR human factors · 2026Article
- Design and model choices shape inference of age-varying genetic effects on complex traits.Nature aging · 2026Article
- MetaboHealth and Metabolic Vulnerability Index as Risk Factors for Cardio-Renal-Metabolic Multimorbidity: A Large-Scale Prospective Cohort Study.Diabetes, obesity & metabolism · 2026Article
- Inflammation, Metabolic Status and Mental Health as Potential Mediators of the Association Between Socioeconomic Deprivation and Frailty.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2026Article
- Triglyceride-Glucose-Related Indexes as Risk Factors for Vision-Threatening Ocular Diseases: A Prospective UK Biobank Study.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2026Article
- Article
- Using Negative Control Outcomes to Detect Selection Bias in Mendelian Randomization Studies.Statistics in medicine · 2026Article
- Exploring the link between body physiology and cognition: the role of the brain and aging.npj aging · 2026Article
- Clustering of Social Determinants of Health and Their Association With Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes in Atrial Fibrillation.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2026Article
- Potentially modifiable mediators of the association between child abuse and dementia.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Genetic and sociodemographic factors associated with trajectories of physical and mental health multimorbidity in a South Asian cohort in the UK: A multistate modelling analysis.PLoS medicine · 2026Article
- Quantifying and adjusting for selection biases in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study using population-wide individual-level registry information.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Centralized Review of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias Biomedical Repositories and Computational Methods.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Deficit accumulation frailty and risk of incident chronic kidney disease: a prospective analysis of the UK biobank and CHARLS cohorts.International urology and nephrology · 2026Article
- Neurodevelopmental copy-number variants increase risk of internalizing and cardiometabolic multimorbidity: Findings from the UK Biobank.American journal of human genetics · 2026Article
- Causal inference in psychiatric research: how to critically evaluate and interpret mendelian randomization studies.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- UK Biobank at 20 - a growing, global resource for dementia research.Nature reviews. Neurology · 2026Review
- Anonymization and visualization of health data and biomarkers.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study.PLoS medicine · 2026Observational
- Evaluation of the genome-informed risk assessment (GIRA) approach from eMERGE in an independent health system.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundBiobanks typically rely on volunteer-based sampling. This results in large samples (power) at the cost of representativeness (bias). The problem of volunteer bias is debated. Here, we (i) show that volunteering biases associations in UK Biobank (UKB) and (ii) estimate inverse probability (IP) weights that correct for volunteer bias in UKB.
methodsDrawing on UK Census data, we constructed a subsample representative of UKB's target population, which consists of all individuals invited to participate. Based on demographic variables shared between the UK Census and UKB, we estimated IP weights (IPWs) for each UKB participant. We compared 21 weighted and unweighted bivariate associations between these demographic variables to assess volunteer bias.
resultsVolunteer bias in all associations, as naively estimated in UKB, was substantial-in some cases so severe that unweighted estimates had the opposite sign of the association in the target population. For example, older individuals in UKB reported being in better health, in contrast to evidence from the UK Census. Using IPWs in weighted regressions reduced 87% of volunteer bias on average. Volunteer-based sampling reduced the effective sample size of UKB substantially, to 32% of its original size.
conclusionsEstimates from large-scale biobanks may be misleading due to volunteer bias. We recommend IP weighting to correct for such bias. To aid in the construction of the next generation of biobanks, we provide suggestions on how to best ensure representativeness in a volunteer-based design. For UKB, IPWs have been made available.
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