A new federal research grant will enable the Framingham Heart Study, the nation’s longest-running multigenerational study of cardiovascular disease, to explore the biology of aging.
In the next phase of the 71-year-old study, researchers from Boston University’s School of Medicine will measure changes in traits such as blood pressure, stiffness of arteries, stickiness of blood platelets, and fat accumulation in the liver of participants — most of them children or grandchildren of Framingham residents first enrolled in the study in 1948.
“This will let us do deep phenotyping,” said Dr. Vasan Ramachandran, principal investigator and B.U. director of the Framingham Heart Study. “Technology has changed. When this study began, we could measure a few proteins circulating in the blood. Now we have [advanced] screening where we can measure up to 1,300 proteins.”
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