The University of Alabama at Birmingham will receive $36.7 million from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute within the National Institutes of Health to continue the Birmingham field and coordinating centers for the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study. Since the study began in 1985, CARDIA data have been published in over 1,000 papers that have generated nearly 58,000 citations.
The CARDIA coordinating center, led by James Shikany, DrPH, Oberman Endowed Professor in Preventive Medicine, will receive $29 million to facilitate and oversee study activities for the next 10 years. The field center, led by Cora E. Lewis, M.D., chair of the Department of Epidemiology, and Kelley Pettee Gabriel, Ph.D., associate dean for Research in the UAB School of Public Health, received $7.7 million to continue to follow the participants they originally recruited in Birmingham.
“We still have a lot to learn about the development of heart disease. We are at the point in CARDIA where people have reached the age when we see actual cardiovascular events, not just the presence of risk factors or subclinical disease,” Shikany said. “This kind of study enables us to look at the natural development of cardiovascular disease instead of just being able to look at snapshots here and there.”