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This year, the Framingham Heart Study turns 50.
Excerpted from CNN Online - 9/27/98

In the fall of 1948, the federal government launched an unprecedented attempt to understand this killer. The idea: Go into one small town. Amass volumes of health facts on ordinary 30ish people. Then watch what happens. Perhaps in time some link will emerge between the way they live and the fate of their hearts.

The result is the Framingham Heart Study, the longest running major epidemiological project in medicine and certainly one of the most influential experiments ever.

One of the early findings from the Framingham Heart Study focused on high blood pressure. Framingham revealed in 1971, is just the opposite. Rising blood pressure is worrisome at any age. The higher it gets, the greater the risk of strokes.

At the outset, the Framingham doctors recorded 80 variables, things like weight, electrocardiogram readings, exercise habits, cholesterol levels -- anything that might remotely have an effect on the heart.

The study was scheduled to last for 20 years, and after 10 years, some patterns began to emerge. One of the first discoveries, published in 1959, was that heart attacks could be painless, leaving a scar on the heart but no symptoms.

Soon others piled up:

  • Ten years before Wolf and Kannel found a link between elderly blood pressure and strokes, the Framingham doctors discovered that high blood pressure appears to trigger heart attacks. That breakthrough was one of the pivotal pieces of evidence that led to the universal effort to spot high blood pressure and lower it with drugs, diet and exercise.

  • Cigarette smoking is bad for the heart. The discovery was ammunition for the surgeon general's landmark campaign against smoking.

  • Too much cholesterol in the blood raises the risk of heart attacks, while high-density lipoprotein -- HDL -- actually protects against heart disease.

  • Physical exercise lowers the risk of heart disease; being overweight increases it.

  • Menopause abruptly increases the risk of heart disease.

  • Atrial fibrillation, the seemingly harmless irregular beating of the heart's upper chamber, is a powerful trigger of strokes.

  • Diabetes is an important underlying cause of heart disease.

  • Estrogen pills after menopause lower the risk of broken hips.

    Copyright 1998 The Associated Press.

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