HEALTHFramingham Heart Study: The beat goes onA long-running Massachusetts study on heart disease has dramatically changed the way medicine is practiced today, and it promises to continue to break new ground.By Susan J. Landers, amednews staff. Feb. 18, 2002. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman won an upset victory over Thomas Dewey, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, the average income was less than $3,000 a year, life expectancy was 63 years and great numbers of people were dying of cardiovascular disease. Also in that year, the Framingham Heart Study was begun in an attempt to identify factors that contributed to this growing epidemic of heart disease. Intended as a 20-year study, it's still going strong. After 53 years it is the longest running prospective epidemiologic study of heart disease ever and researchers are now enrolling the grandchildren of the study's original participants. Its success is legendary among heart specialists, boosting the fame of the town of Framingham, Mass., and even making its participants somewhat celebrities. There's no doubt that the study's findings have been important. "The Framingham Heart Study provided the foundation for preventive cardiology as we know it today," said Roger Blumenthal, MD, director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. "It was one of the first to alert doctors and the public that there are major risk factors for heart disease that we now take for granted. But 50 years ago there was still a lot of controversy about what caused heart attacks and strokes," said Dr. Blumenthal, who is also a national spokesperson for the American Heart Assn. "We've had an enormous impact using data from the Framingham Heart Study to identify people who are at risk and then modifying those risk factors," said Teri Manolio, MD, PhD, director of epidemiology and biometry at the National Institutes of Health National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.
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Copyright 2002 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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