The goal of this project is to bring to a responsible conclusion the 13- year Work Site Blood Pressure Study. Begun in 1985, this study was designed to test the hypothesis that job strain is a risk factor for hypertension and cardiovascular target organ damage. With 475 initially- healthy participants, including sizable proportions of women and minorities, recruited from ten work sites this is the largest study of work stress and ambulatory blood pressure in the world. The repeat assessments of study participants every 3-4 years has resulted in a dataset that is unique in its combination of psychosocial and cardiovascular measures. At the conclusion of the present funding period, we will have completed the fourth and final round of assessments on all available participants from the first nine work sites. This proposal requests funds to support one more year of data collection so that participants from our tenth site, who were first evaluated in 1995, can be reassessed. This site from which 103 participants (all nurses) were recruited, was added to the cohort study in order to increase the number of women in the study from 81 to a more respectable 174. While the total period of follow-up will only be 3 years, rather than the 6-10 years for participants from the other sites, this second re-evaluation is critical to our being able to address the same questions with women that we have already addressed and are planning to address for men. During the first year, we will also obtain ambulatory blood pressure recordings on those former participants who have left the NYC metropolitan area during the course of the study, and therefore have not been available for follow-up. Years 2 and 3 of the grant will be used to conduct extensive analyses of this rich database and prepare manuscripts for publication. There are many etiological questions about the development of hypertension and target organ damage, both in relation to psychosocial factors and independent of them, that can only be addressed with a longitudinal database that containing high-quality repeat assessments of the cardiovascular outcome measures using state-of-the-art methodology. It will require at least two years to reap the benefits of the many years of effort and extraordinary cooperation of study.
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