Ethical approvals

All data used in this project relied on the UKB resource, which was approved by the National Health Service National Research Ethics Service (ref. 11/NW/0382). All participants provided informed consent prior to inclusion in the UKB. We obtained permission to use the data (permission number 27412) for our project. In accordance with the regulations surrounding UKB access, any variables we derived from the data we used were returned to the UKB for inclusion in their database.

A more in-depth discussion of the ethical considerations of the work contained in this thesis is presented in the Discussion ?sec-discussion chapter.