Infrastructure for mentored access to CHS data and specimens - ABSTRACT Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) is a population-based cohort study of 5888 older adults recruited in the 1990s and designed to study traditional and novel risk factors for onset and course of heart disease and stroke. Subclinical disease measures include pulmonary function, carotid ultrasound, echocardiography, cranial magnetic resonance imaging and others. CHS originated the Working Group (WG) model that provides mentored-access to CHS, an especially valuable model for early-career investigators. The CHS WGs—Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Geriatrics, Neurology, Renal, Bone and Genetics—have been productive. With more than 2120 publications, CHS has an h-index of 240. As of Dec 2023, CHS also has 78 active ancillary studies, 41 of them currently funded by the NIH, and another 22 in revision or under review. NHLBI contract funding for CHS has, however, not been steadfast. Contract funding for examinations ended in 1999. The surveillance calls did continue. In 2005, the NHLBI also ceased contract funding for events data collection. An investigator-initiated grant (HL080295) supported events data collection until 2015. In 2016, when the NHLBI ceased contract funding for CHS altogether, an investigator-initiated grant (HL130114) continued support for the Biorepository, for ongoing surveillance calls to participants, and for the support of working groups through 2020. A new NHLBI contract supports CHS until Oct 2024. In Nov 2024, about 25 of 60 CHS active ancillary studies will have NIH funding that persists beyond the end of the contract. Also, TOPMed has just awarded CHS almost $10 million worth of multi-omics assays (8619 proteomics, 8619 metabolomics, and 8041 DNA methylation) with 3 timepoints as available for participants with WGS data. At this time, the NHLBI lacks an NCI-like mechanism for infrastructure grants for epidemiology cohorts (PAR-20-294), so the only option for CHS is again (as we did in 2016) to seek peer-reviewed R01 funding even though the genre of infrastructure support differs from that of hypothesis-testing grants. The purpose is to provide a scientific service and maintain a major research resource for the scientific community. None of the study aims involves a hypothesis test, but these service aims enable the myriad hypothesis-based activities of the CHS investigators and ancillary studies. The primary aims of this grant application are: 1) to provide infra-structure support to maintain the CHS Coordinating Center, its various databases, and activities, including support for 78 ancillary studies; 2) to assist investigators in developing grant applications for new ancillary studies; 3) to provide support for the CHS Biorepository; 4) to provide mentored access to CHS data and its specimens; 5) to provide limited support for 7 CHS Working Groups; 6) to make CHS data and ancillary-study opportunities widely available to all investigators; and 7) to keep CHS active for critically important participation in multi-omic and multi-study collaborations such as TOPMed. The findings from CHS will be vital for developing novel CVD preventive strategies to improve the health of older adults.
