Framingham Heart Study Receives $ 38 Million for Research on Aging | BU today

By looking closely at older participants in the Framingham Heart Study, it will explore age-related changes in blood pressure, arterial stiffness, blood platelets, and age-related liver fat accumulation. Sylverarts / iStock Stock Chart

The country's oldest heart disease study, led by Boston University and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), will study how aging affects the heart and other organs of the brain to the liver.

The Framingham Heart Study (FHS), which has been in existence for more than 70 years, has received $ 38 million from the NHLBI to conduct the new six-year study, which will explore changes in blood pressure, stiffness, blood platelets and liver. fat accumulation in older subjects of the study. Many of these people are the children or grandchildren of the first FHS participants, which began in 1948 when Harry Truman was president.

With each member of the massive baby boom generation having senior status by 2030, research will be critical to understanding the effects of this aging population, said the principal investigator. study, Vasan Ramachandran, professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and FHS. director.

"With the growing number of Americans over the age of 65, comprehensive studies of seniors are invaluable," he said. "The ability to perform a comprehensive analysis … of abnormalities in the elderly, using cutting-edge scientific technology, is unprecedented."

According to Ramachandran, this new technology includes ultrasonic rays directed to the liver to measure fat storage and tonometry, which generates pulse waves to identify arterial stiffness.

Researchers will examine blood and tissue samples from approximately 1,900 FSH participants who joined the study in 1971; they are the children of the original participants. Although they are all white, the study will include 450 additional subjects recruited in 1995, including people of color. In the end, researchers are also hoping to study aging among 4,000 other people – grandchildren of the original subjects – who joined the study in 2002.

Ramachandran says this is not the first time the FHS has been exploring other organs than the heart. "This is the result of several studies. The heart is tied to all other organ systems, "he says, asking FHS researchers to probe these connections and systems.

The BU administers the FHS, which is led by the NHLBI and includes researchers from MED, the School of Public Health and the College of Arts & Sciences. With 5,209 residents in Framingham, Massachusetts, the FHS has published more than 2,850 articles and is known to have coined the term "risk factors," as well as to save or improve the lives of countless people.

Over the course of its seven decades, the study has focused on the risk of smoking associated with smoking, reported in 1960; the basic risk factors for heart disease, in 1961; the benefits of exercise – and the risk of obesity – for heart disease (1967); how hypertension can increase the risk of stroke (1970); and the role of HDL ("good cholesterol") in mitigating the risk of death (1988). TThe Framingham Heart Study, the country's oldest epidemiological study, has been run by the BU since 1971.

In recent decades, the FHS has confirmed that people whose parents had heart disease or stroke before the age of 65 were twice as likely to get the disease. The study has also collaborated with other research groups to identify hundreds of genetic influences that increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Karen Antman, Dean of MED and Provost of the Medical Campus, said: "The ambitious mission of the study educates not only the public about the implications of the results of their research, but also offers the next generation of scientists training opportunities. vital.