Biobanking

Well, I’m not sure but I think it must have been about somewhere between ten and fourteen years ago.

 

Yeah.

 

Yes.

 

Oh, there’s been gaps, you know. I mean, some years you don’t hear from them, and then at other times you could hear from them twice a year or, you know.

 

And then sometimes when you get a letter asking you to go along to do something it could be quite a few months, because by the time you sort of liaise with them and then you get mutual dates, and then you quite often go up for a like a pre sort of screening, you know? So you go up and they’ll go through everything with you that they’re going to do, maybe do height and weight again, and blood pressure, take a sample of blood, and then you go in again for the actual proper screening, so that in itself could take quite a few months in between.

 

Not really. I’m sure even at the beginning it was something to do with diabetes, but I’m not a hundred per cent certain, because it was just so long ago. But obviously everything since then has been due, has been with the diabetics, you know, to do with diabetes.

I mean, I felt the information they gave me was really quite detailed. It was - and certainly for the insulin one which I declined it was detailed enough for me to think, “I don’t really want to do that.” For the adrenaline one there was enough, there was lots of information. And some elements of it I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, I...” And some elements I thought, “Well, I’m not entirely certain on that.” There was plenty of information but I’m, I didn’t feel qualified enough to understand it. It talked about medical, you know, they were all medical procedures. And I can’t remember whether they actually gave a percentage risk for any of them. But the implication was that, you know, it’s invasive and there are risks associated with all of these. So I read through it and thought, read through it a couple of times and thought, “Well, I’m interested enough to do it. And it sounds - it doesn’t sound dangerous otherwise they wouldn’t be putting it out.”

 

So I, the information they gave me was sufficient to, for somebody to make a decision. I didn’t feel it was enough for me to make the decision on my own. So I’m not sure what my GP would have thought if I’d gone to them and asked them to read through it. But I, you know, I was fortunate in having somebody in the family who I felt I could ask and would give me a reasonably honest opinion.

A letter arrived in the post and it said that there was a national piece of research going on and it was all about the biobank. And because I work in a large teaching [hospital] organisation in the NHS, I know [something] about research and I’d learnt about the biobank.

 

It’s one of the aims of academic health science centres to understand more about the population and the impact of [activities and interventions] on [patients and] the population. So I’m, I’m very interested in this topic, so I was delighted to be invited. So I didn’t really read any of the enclosures. I just did, carried on doing what I was doing, but I did ring up and make an appointment, and as it got nearer the date, I couldn’t make that date and so I rang up again. They were absolutely fine about me changing the date, so it was very, very easy to make the appointment. And I noticed, obviously, that is was in [local town] so I knew when I needed to get there. 

I was going for my 18 week fetal anomaly scan and while I was booking in at the hospital there was a sign on the side of the booking-in desk which was basically requesting people to donate their stem cells. So I had a look at the leaflet on the wall, and asked for a, a patient information sheet and took that home. And that was the end of it for till I had my next antenatal visit with my midwife, at which I discussed the fact that I’d seen this, read the information sheet and thought that I’d like to do it. And she put that in my notes. And so it went down on my notes and I completely forgot about it. 

When I became pregnant I had to go to a regular clinic, a regular antenatal clinic, for high risk pregnancies, and so I actually asked them if there were any research projects I could volunteer for. I have done this kind of thing before. I’ve been a blood donor since I was 18 years old. I carry a donor card as well, and my husband and I have together participated in a few research projects such as MRI scans of the heart, which was quite hard work, but fun and satisfying. So I was, I was already aware of the value of different kinds of medical research, and because it had taken me so much help to get pregnant, if I could possibly put back into the system I wanted to.

I heard about it from Louise because she’s a med-, a research nurse at the hospital. And we’re both endurance, we’re into endurance sports. Louise runs and I cycle, and what goes along with that is often a concern about heart rate and blood pressure and all these sort of things, slightly unhealthy perhaps, occasionally. But anyway, we’ve got a concern about these things. And it seemed, it seemed to be both a useful and interesting thing to do, to get a medical check to see where we are in, by all these medical measures. That was certainly one, one aspect of it. And also I suppose a general belief in that, helping out the research world, medical research world, in that, with the idea it may contribute in however small a way to the general good, I suppose. Those are the main motivations, I would say.

 

To be honest I’m not quite sure. I mean she comes across these sorts of things at work often. We often discuss some of the, you know, research that she’s undertaking and that’s all I can say, really. I’m not entirely sure the exact process by which we became aware of it.

I gave blood for a diabetes research project, but it was a long time ago and I really can’t remember any details. And then because I work in the health, the health field, education, health education, I’ve been approached by a colleague at work, and happened to be approached while I was making a cup of tea in the kitchen, you know, and she said, “Oh, we’re trying to get people to give some blood for a study that we’re doing”. And I said, “Sure, no problem.” So again, [chuckles] had an information sheet, read it, got, took a load of blood from, and I think that was being used to - it was, it was a genetics research project, so they were checking for a lot of things. I think it was sort of genealogies and genetics for genealogy, so working out what genes follow down certain lines and various things like that.

 

So did that involve giving some family history, answering questions about your family?

 

Very brief family history. I think it had where I was born, where my - actually I think I did – yes, I think I had to put down where my dad and where my mum was born. But that was it. It wasn’t very much.

 

No, so they didn’t want to know about prior history of …

 

No.

 

.. heart disease and…

 

No.

 

.. all that sort of thing?

 

No.

 

No?

 

None of that.

 

OK.

 

And I think to a certain extent I think they were sort of almost using a lot of them as sort of blind trials, so to see what the blood itself showed up. But again it was just one of those things. It wasn’t, it wasn’t going to take any time out of my day You know, I think I was actually having blood drawn and I was on the telephone at the same time, so [laughs] I really, it really wasn’t a big deal. And because it wasn’t a big deal I really can’t remember much about it. And it wasn’t one of those things I’d thought about, whereas I’d actually thought about the stem, donating stem cells….

 

Yeah.

 

… before and it was something I believed in and I thought was a very good idea. 

 

And did, when they took your consent, did they tell you whether it was for a specific bit of research, or just for banking for any future uses?

 

No, it was for banking for anything, really, any future uses. Although I think it was to do with cancer research, although I’d probably need to go back and check the information. But I think I, it was to do with cancer research.

 

 

No, very - well, very little. I’m surprised I haven’t had more, more back from them. It was a, quite a detailed questionnaire at the time. As I say about eight or ten tubes of, phials of blood. She sent me a questionnaire in the post, which I duly returned. And that was about it. I sort of expected more, more from this, but no, nothing else has come out of it, this one.

 

 

Yes, I thought you were going to ask me that. I’ve become quite blasé, and I’m very happy to give my time and bits of me for research, to a point of where as long as I see the correct ethical clearance on the forms and the other bits and pieces, I’ll do them and sign them and carry on, because, you know, I’ve read them and seen them before and done it before. And I have to admit I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention as to what she was aiming to do out of it.

 

I think she was genotyping actually. Yes, I think she was genotyping.

 

I think there were some in there, yes, there were certainly. There was the usual one for the liver, of course, which is, “Do you drink?” and all of that kind of stuff, which always comes up. But that question only stands out because it’s so, such a standard question on a, on anything to do with the liver.

I think then I probably settled back into thinking that, “Well, I’m not going to be able to take part in any trials” because, again, of my, the rarity of my disease. And so it was a little while after that that I learnt about the [Motor Neurone Disease] study in Oxford which was going to be starting in the near future. And it seemed to encompass anybody with MND, and so I thought that this was another opportunity to actually be a little bit proactive about my disease. It had taken a very long time to diagnose, the same as many, many other people who walk down the same path, and the lack of biomarkers and a specific test for MND is one of the major problems. And I’d felt for quite a while that that was quite an important issue for not just myself, but for everybody who has the condition. And so I thought I ought to put my money where my mouth is and volunteer. I did get the information and I read what it involved, and I thought, “Well, I can do that.” I don’t have a worry about things like MRI scans or blood samples, I don’t even have a particular concern about lumbar punctures. I’d, in my career as an anaesthetist, I had performed similar things thousands of times, and it didn’t hold any concerns to me at all. So I thought I’d volunteer and I found it quite an interesting experience. It’s, I think one’s got to be well aware of the time element - I don’t mean in terms of the number of visits per se, I mean it’s twice a year - but you’ve got to be prepared to give up, you know, five hours plus to get through all the tests that are needed, and I knew that as somebody with slowly progressive MND then I was probably better placed than many to be able to cope with that.

After that, a member of their team did contact me about - I think I gave them the feeling that I was willing to talk about my, my issues, I was willing to share my experience. And they gave us a bit of space while, obviously, we took it all in and broke all our news and did everything we wanted to. But probably about four or five weeks after I’d been there, they made contact and said, “How would you feel if we spoke to you about doing certain things?” And then they sent a lot of information in the post to us to read. They gave us websites to look at, but it was never pushy. It was always down to us to, to get back to them. There were some questionnaires that came through from some other areas, people that we hadn’t dealt with directly. I think there’s a research group in Liverpool that were quite keen to get some data from me. We did participate with that to start off with, but we dropped that fairly quickly because we felt the team that we’d got involved in in[city] , if we had time, then it was their time. It wasn’t time for other people.