Framingham Heart Study to hunt for a blood test to predict heart disease

The Framingham Heart Study, famous for its lessons about high blood pressure and cholesterol gleaned from generations of the town's volunteers, is searching for a new way to predict who might be at high risk for heart disease and stroke.

The 60-year-old study announced today that it would partner with Waltham-based BG Medicine in a five-year project to study blood tests and other medical records from more than 7,000 participants. They hope to discover substances in the blood that may be linked to heart disease and metabolic syndrome, a collection of risk factors such as obesity and high blood sugar that can precede type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Researchers will study about 1,000 proteins or molecules, called biomarkers, in the blood samples.

"This new agreement takes our research to a whole new level," Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, said in a statement. "Imagine having a simple blood test to tell us if a patient is at high risk for a heart attack or stroke -- we could do so much more to prevent or delay these often debilitating and deadly diseases."

The Framingham Heart Study is funded by NHBLI and conducted in collaboration with the Boston University School of Public Health. BG Medicine will bring its technology for detecting biological changes to the project.