HEART DISEASE: THE FRAMINGHAM STUDY AND THE BRITISH REGIONAL HEART STUDY

While the Finns were taking action, the Americans and British were still gathering data. The classic study of heart disease in individuals is that produced in the small New England community of Framingham, Massachusetts, eighteen miles west of Boston. In 1948, five thousand men and women aged thirty to fifty-nine years from the population of twenty-eight thousand were recruited into a long-term study. They were to be examined every two years, indefinitely.

They, and several more groups recruited at intervals since then, are still under study. Well over half of the original group have died, and their illnesses and causes of death have been scrutinized in detail.

The British Regional Heart Study (referred to in the introduction) started in 1978 is also continuing.

The American and British results are similar, despite the great differences in geography and lifestyles. In Framingham, in general, smokers died several years before nonsmokers, from heart attacks, as well as from lung diseases such as cancer and bronchitis. Men and women with diabetes also tended to have heart and circulation disorders that shortened their lives.

What surprised the doctors in the Framingham Study most, though, was the very close link between death from heart attacks and the level of blood cholesterol. A higher than average cholesterol level put the men at particularly high risk of a coronary death, the risk being multiplied many times more if it was linked with cigarette smoking, and even higher still if high blood pressure was added.

The Framingham Study raised crucial questions for the American authorities. Could control of cholesterol, smoking, and high blood pressure be the answer to the heart disease pandemic that was killing half the American population?

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