Framingham Heart Study

Cathy entered the weight-loss program at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School with a warm personality, an infectious smile and a great desire to be thin. My colleagues and I were beginning to experiment with a very low-calorie diet at our clinic, a fast combined with nutrition supplements that was designed to get rid of a lot of weight very quickly. The diet had just 420 calories per day. Cathy did well on it initially, dropping from 230 to 193 pounds. Then she stopped losing weight.

Dr. Thomas Royle Dawber, 92, whose research transformed the medical world's understanding of heart disease, died Nov. 23 in Florida after a battle with Alzheimer's disease, his daughter, Dr. Nancy Dawber, said. He led the Framingham Heart Study in Framingham, Mass., one of the most important research projects of the 20th century, for two decades beginning in 1949. It was founded by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1948 to discover the causes of heart disease and ways to prevent it.

Obesity raises the risk of atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heartbeat that can lead to stroke and early death if not controlled, researchers report. "What we found is that obesity was associated with an approximately 50% increase in the risk of developing atrial fibrillation," Dr. Thomas Wang of the Framingham Heart Study said last week.

HERE'S something to kick around. People who do about 6 to 9 miles a week of recreational walking don't appear to be at greater risk for osteoarthritis of the knee than their more sedentary peers, according to a study appearing in the February issue of Arthritis Care & Research. On the flip side, recreational walking doesn't appear to confer meaningful protection from osteoarthritis either, as some smaller studies have suggested.

People with a relatively common heart condition appear to face substantially increased risks of developing or dying from heart disease, the nation's foremost killer, researchers said last week. A study of more than 3,000 people age 40 and over found a "significant" relationship between a condition that leaves the heart enlarged and an increased incidence of fatal heart attacks and other types of heart disease, said Dr. Daniel Levy of the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts.

Stroke is the result of a blockage of blood flow to the brain or bleeding in the brain. Each year, about 600,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke. Here are more facts about strokes in the U.S.: * It's the third-leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. * In 1996, strokes killed 159,942 people: 97,467 females and 62,475 males. * On average, someone suffers a stroke every 53 seconds; someone dies of one every 3.3 minutes. * Strokes aren't a death sentence; about 4.

Dr. Joseph Stokes III, the first dean of the UC San Diego School of Medicine and an internationally known expert in preventive medicine and cardiovascular epidemiology, died of cancer Monday in Boston at the age of 64. Stokes, born in Philadelphia, was the fourth generation of doctors in his family. Dr. Robert N. Hamburger, his former assistant dean at the school of medicine and professor of pediatrics at UCSD, called Stokes one of the finest doctors he has ever known. Hamburger and Stokes were friends during the 18 years Stokes was on the faculty at the school of medicine.

They say misery loves company, but the same may be even more true of happiness. In a study published online today by the British Medical Journal, scientists from Harvard University and UC San Diego showed that happiness spreads readily through social networks of family members, friends and neighbors. Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.

Blood-pressure medicine reduces the risk of developing an enlarged heart and may be responsible for the decline in the heart disease death rate since the late 1960s. The ongoing Framingham (Mass.) Heart Study of 10,333 volunteers confirmed a dramatic reduction in the number of cases of left ventricular hypertrophy, in which the main pumping chamber of the heart becomes dangerously enlarged to compensate for higher blood pressure. A team led by Dr.