The Framingham Heart Study continues to yield new insights—decades after it began
The 77-year-old Framingham Heart Study “told us that cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, diet, sedentary lifestyle—these are the core risk factors for cardiovascular disease,” says Donald Lloyd-Jones, principal investigator and chief of preventive medicine at our Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center. “It saved a lot of lives around the world.”
Gradually the study, a partnership between Boston University and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, has widened to include most chronic diseases associated with aging. Thousands of researchers have derived more than 15,000 scientific papers from its data on 15,477 participants. Now, genomics and AI have been added to its toolkit.
One example: In the mid-2000s, Rhoda Au, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology, began collecting digital voice recordings of older Framingham participants. The recordings were recently studied using AI by a team at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, logging speech clues that can reveal cognitive impairment likely to progress to dementia.
“What’s important about that now is, we actually have FDA-approved therapy to try to slow that progression. So, it’s not just that we can tell you you’re at risk, we might actually be able to do something about it,” says Lloyd-Jones.
However, he says, what’s most remarkable about Framingham “is its participants and their dedication to getting themselves back here for their examination cycles every five years, this cohort of people who have made a difference in the lives of millions.”