I have been the statistician for the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention for over three years. I have participated as an author of 40 papers in established scientific journals, including: the relationships of lipoproteins to diet, exercise, weight loss, cigarette use, sex hormones, and heart rate; lipoprotein subfraction interrelationships; the statistical evaluation of community studies; and the development of new statistical methodology for studying genetic epidemiology of lipoprotein levels. I see the development of my career plans primarily in terms of the pursuit of specific research objectives: 1) to synthesize previous research on the effects of exercise on lipoprotein metabolism into a cohesive theory; 2) to evaluate methodologic approaches for describing the relationships of diet to CHD risk factors in epidemiologic surveys; and 3) to develop statistical methodology for obtaining unbiased estimates of the relationships between lipoprotein concentrations, exercise and diet when these variables are measured imprecisely due to measurement error. The Research Career Development Award would allow me to devote the time required to make progress in these areas, thereby advancing my potential as an independent investigator through concentrated studies of lipoprotein metabolism, advanced statistical analyses, and experimental design under the direction of Drs. Peter D.S. Wood, William L. Haskell, and John W Farquhar at the Standford Center for Research in Disease Prevention, and Dr. Ronald M. Krauss at the University of California at Berkeley. The Research Career Development Award is requested for the purposes of continuing my studies into the effects of exercise, weight-loss and diet on plasma lipoprotein concentrations through the statistical analyses to data collected as part of three studies on the effects of exercise and weight loss on plasma lipoprotein concentrations. The specific objective of the analyses set forth in this proposal are: 1) Develop more completely a proposed theory on the relationship of weight set-point to the elevated HDL concentrations of long-distance runners; 2) Continue my analyses of the effects of training level, weight loss, increased calorie intake, and improved fitness on serum mass concentrations of low and very-low density lipoproteins; 3) Assess the effects of measurement error on correlational analyses of changes in plasma lipoprotein concentrations in these three longitudinal studies of weight loss and exercise; 4) Assess the effects of measurement error on correlational analyses on nutrient intake and lipoprotein concentrations using the baseline data collected in the three studies; 5) Examine the correlations of intakes of calories from food groups vs. lipoprotein concentrations as an alternative to the traditional epidemiologic approach to studying diet/lipoprotein relationships with respect to nutrient intake.
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