Dr. Lori Mosca is a Junior faculty member in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Michigan who recently completed an NRSA training program in Preventive Cardiology and received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Columbia University in May, 1996. Over the past two years she has been actively involved in the initiation of The Women's Pooling Project, which was established to address the critical need for information about cardiovascular risk factors and disease in women. The goal of the WPP is to combine data collected over the past 40 years from long term, community-based studies in the United States, for the purpose of examining health issues in women that cannot be adequately addressed in a single study. The WPP is a historical prospective study which has well characterized cohorts with nearly 100% follow-up, large numbers and ethnic diversity. Cardiovascular risk in women will be examined by pooling data on over 12,000 women aged 30 - 79 years from the Charleston Heart Study, the Evan's County Study, the Framingham Heart Study, the Rancho Bernardo Study, the San Antonio Heart Study, and the Tecumseh Community Health Study. The WPP includes risk factors such as age, blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, body mass index, smoking pattern, educational level, and electrographic findings. An NHLBI sponsored pilot study was conducted that demonstrated pooling data from the above cohorts was feasible. Preliminary results suggest there are striking differences in the burden of cardiovascular risk factors among ethnic subgroups in the WPP. The prevalence of traditional cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and their relation to mortality due to all causes, CVD and coronary heart disease (CHD) will be determined overall and by ethnic group. The proposed study will also evaluate the corresponding male data from each cohort and will examine gender differences in the burden of cardiovascular risk factors on mortality due to all causes, CVD and CHD. This study will generate timely data regarding cardiovascular risk in women and how it differs from men that may be useful for developing appropriate preventive strategies for diverse populations. Dr. Mosca will conduct the proposed research under the guidance of Dr. Millicent Higgins, an internationally recognized Cardiovascular Epidemiologist. The goal of this award will be to develop Dr. Mosca into an independent researcher so that she will be able to make contributions to the field of Cardiovascular Epidemiology, specifically in the area of Women's Health.
