A watershed event The Paivas signed up, along with Joe's brother and sister. The result is the Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running major epidemiological project in medicine and certainly one of the most influential experiments ever. I'd like to think that the work from Framingham really has changed the lives of Americans and contributed to the public health of our nation. Few would argue with that. Indeed, it seems just about everything people know about what causes heart attacks and strokes, and what prevents them, comes from Framingham.
Experts stumble over superlatives to describe the study's impact.
But the study's impact has been equally profound on the health practices of folks who have never even heard of the Framingham Heart Study. What makes Framingham impressive is how much it has changed. The depths of pre-Framingham ignorance when the Pavias got their call are now hard to comprehend. It went way beyond the evils of jelly doughnuts. What we take as truth today was far from obvious even in the 1970s.