This research will take advantage of an existing data base resulting to 47956 white Californian Seventh-day Adventists. Seventh-day Adventists are a health oriented religious group with a conservative lifestyle who do not smoke or drink by church proscription. Evidence from an older American and also Dutch and Norwegian studies find that Adventists have a greatly reduced mortality from IHD as compared to non-Adventists. The data base referred to above contains extensive demographic, psychosocial, exercise and dietary data gathered at baseline and also a record of diagnostic information for non-fatal ischemic heart disease over a six year follow-up (1976-1982) and fatal ischemic heart disease over an eight year follow-up (1974-1982). This grant application is mainly to support analysis and preparation of reports from the data set, also a modest amount of initial data entry to computer files. The questions to be answered include the relation of many lifestyle and psychosocial characteristics to risk of fatal and non-fatal ischemic heart disease, also evaluation of interactions between exposures and the ischemic heart disease end points. The analysis will utilize stratified analysis, the Poisson regression model for grouped data and Cox proportional hazards model. An unusual feature of this data set is the wide range of exposures that should theoretically enhance statistical power.
