Same reason I'm P6 instead of Prometheus 6.

Anyway...

A Conversation With Herman Taylor
Mississippi's 'Heart Man' Examines Links Between Race and Disease
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

JACKSON, Miss. — When Dr. Herman A. Taylor Jr. goes for breakfast in this city of 180,000, he orders carefully: granola, fresh fruit. "People look at what I put on my tray," he said on a recent morning at the Broad Street Bakery, a local cafe. "They wonder if I practice what I preach."

Around Jackson, where a common breakfast can be eggs fried in lard, Dr. Taylor, a University of Mississippi cardiologist, is known as "heart man." He is the director of the Jackson Heart Study, the largest epidemiological investigation ever undertaken to discover the links between cardiovascular disease and race.

From now until 2014, Dr. Taylor and his team will be following 5,302 black residents of three Mississippi counties — Hinds, Rankin and Madison — observing their lives and how their heart health is related to their environment.

For the study's participants, there will be periodic medical examinations and referrals for care when problems are detected. The ultimate aim of the $54 million investigation, Dr. Taylor said, "is to gain the information we need to stop an epidemic of cardiovascular diseases within the African-American community."

Q. The Framingham Heart Study, which tracked cardiovascular disease in three generations of New Englanders, is thought to be the most productive investigation in public health history. With Framingham's research continuing, why do something similar here in Jackson?

A. Framingham can't tell us everything. You can probably count the number of blacks in the original study on one hand. Well, maybe two. It's no one's fault. When that study was first begun in 1948, the town of Framingham was mostly populated by second-generation immigrants and Yankees. That's just what it was.

But if there are unique risks and environmental agents triggering cardiovascular disease in African-Americans, Framingham's data can't be that helpful.

Q. Is there a special problem with heart disease in African-Americans?

A. For the nation as a whole, death from cardiovascular disease has declined since 1963. Yet, if you look at African-Americans in regions like Mississippi, mortality from heart disease is flat, or trending upward. This is particularly true for women. A middle-aged black woman in Mississippi will have four times the risk of death from cardiovascular disease than a white woman elsewhere in the country.

We have reasonable guesses why this is so. We think obesity is hugely important. We also think that smoking, inactivity, high blood pressure and access to health care figure into the problem, too. But we have to pin it down. We need more information on things like social support, anger, hostility, optimism. There may also be some unique buffers against stress within our community — like religion and extended family.

When you do a study like this, you want to figure out what's killing people. You enroll a large number and follow them. Over the years, some people will get sick; others won't. So the job is to try to determine the difference between those who got sick and those who didn't.

That's how Framingham worked.