World-renowned multigenerational research: The Framingham Heart Study

The Framingham Heart Study (FHS) at Boston University is one of the world’s most informative and longest-running studies, now including three generations. Beginning with 5,209 participants in 1948, the family-based study provided much of the earliest scientific evidence of the relationships between cardiovascular disease and smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Much of what we know about heart disease is based on this longitudinal study, which currently has some 8,000 participants and has seen a total of 15,447 since its inception.

Researchers are using FHS data to investigate stroke, dementia, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and the genetic patterns of many common diseases. More than 3,000 articles based on the study’s data have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Genetics, Circulation, and the Lancet.