LEGACY

The LEGACY Vision

For more than 75 years, the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) has transformed the way the world understands heart disease, stroke, and other chronic conditions. Such discoveries have been made possible thanks to the tremendous generosity and contributions from participants like you.

As you likely know already, many of the chronic diseases in people are complex. Our understanding of the effects of a lifetime of disease risk factors or health behaviors on a human organ, such as the heart, is unknown. Although we have learned a lot about a particular outcome that an individual might have (such as high blood pressure, their blood sugar levels, whether a person has had a heart attack) from blood samples, imaging or testing, we cannot understand how health behaviors or disease risk factors affect the actual tissue or cells affected in chronic conditions unless we can study the organ itself.

The LEGACY program, the first of its kind, is a tissue biobank that will enable us to study tissues most often affected in chronic conditions, and specifically the heart. Individuals who are interested in providing one last research contribution to the FHS and broader community may sign-up for heart donation after they pass away. The ability to pair the heart tissue data with all of the data collected at prior research visits across the lifespan will lead to new discoveries to improve the lives of people living with heart conditions. Heart donation from FHS participants like you will facilitate decades of research to come that will deepen our understanding of heart health and disease and energize new scientific breakthroughs.

Since 1948, every FHS participant has been a pioneer in medical research. With this LEGACY Biobank program and your willingness to donate, you will enable an unprecedented scientific resource that will fuel medical discoveries and therapeutics for generations to come.