Framingham Heart Study

The Framingham Heart Study was a study of cardiovascular problems based in Framingham, Massachusetts. This town, officially the largest town in New England, was first established in 1650 and had an important place in the American War of Independence, as the birthplace of Crispus Attucks—the first African American killed in the war.

The study started in 1948 when 5,209 adults from Framingham were examined, and it continues to the present day with grandchildren of some of the original participants being tested. It was coordinated by the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), which has worked with Boston University since 1971. It has also drawn people from hospitals and universities in the entire Greater Boston area. The original cohort of 5,209 men and women were between the ages of 30 and 62, an offspring cohort was added in 1971 in research conducted by Boston University, and the study of a third-generation cohort began in April 2002, allowing for a study of hereditary problems. By the middle of 2005, the study involved a survey of 4,095 people.

The idea of an intensive study of one community was partially that of Thomas Royle Dawber, who from 1949 until 1966, was the chief epidemiologist in the study, taking over after its early shaky start. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he attended Harvard Medical School and after 12 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, he started work near Boston and managed to keep the Framingham study going after it initially ran out of funds. He was methodical in his approach and ensured that medical professionals all around the world were aware of causes of coronary heart disease. Dawber and his colleagues published more than 100 papers including one study in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1961 listing the major risk factors. These included aspects such as high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, smoking, obesity, diabetes, and physical inactivity, most of which are now widely known. Dawber was nominated for the Nobel Prize on three occasions.

The Framingham study, because of its intensity and because of the long period of the surveys, has produced much of the knowledge of heart disease as well as on the effects of diet and exercise, and on the side effects from common medications such as aspirins. Often when diagnosing patients, medical professionals compare patients with those studied at Framingham. Some critics of the Framingham Heart Study claim that it overestimates the risk posed to people, with lower-risk groups, such as some communities in other countries, being far less prone to suffer from particular aspects of heart disease. Nevertheless, many medical professionals continue to use the data collected by the Framingham study, and another study has also been undertaken at Busselton, Western Australia, although the results from Framingham are more widely cited.