“Sixty years ago, Americans smoked, drank, and ate too much of the wrong things — then died of heart disease and stroke at higher and higher rates. The town of Framingham turned things around with the help of researchers backed by the National Institutes of Health. The Framingham Heart Study exceeded expectations and changed the way many Americans live. As Framingham residents gather to celebrate their success on Thursday, the study is once again leading researchers into a new era of more personalized, genetically based healthcare. The study began in September 1948, when 5,000 Framingham residents volunteered to let researchers study their lifestyles and track their health histories over the coming years. In time, Framingham researchers had invented the term ‘risk factors’ to describe the links they found between, for example, cardiovascular disease and smoking, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol.” (11/27/07)