Almost everything modern medicine knows about cardiovascular risk factors – cholesterol, blood pressure, smoking – traces back to a single American town: Framingham, Massachusetts, where a study begun in 1948 initially followed more than 5,000 adults.
The study didn’t stop at one generation: an Offspring cohort (the participants’ children) was added in 1971, and a Third Generation cohort in 2002 – essentially the same community, medically tracked across three consecutive generations.
That enormous volume of data produced the cardiovascular risk formulas used worldwide today, including the ones behind modern online calculators – an entire field of medicine built, quite literally, on one town’s health history.
A town of a few tens of thousands of people became, without ever planning to, the global reference point for an entire chapter of cardiology.
See also:
– Cardiovascular Risk Calculator →