Research Projects - Cardiovascular Disease

PHRI has a long-standing collaboration with the Kuakini Medical Center and Honolulu Heart Program (HHP) which, for more than forty years, has followed a cohort of Japanese American men to examine the factors that lead to cardiovascular disease. Many of the original HHP participants continue to play an active role in our research.

The Honolulu Heart Program

The Honolulu Heart Program (HHP) was initially funded in 1965 through a contract from the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute as a prospective study of environmental and biological causes of cardiovascular disease among Japanese American men living in Hawaii. The original study involved a cohort of 8,006 men born between 1900 and 1919. The HHP, in concert with a similar study conducted in European-ancestry Americans in Framingham, Massachusetts, has been seminal in generating a body of knowledge which, when translated into public health strategies, has resulted in nearly a 90% reduction in age-specific rates of fatal stroke, and similar dramatic fall in fatal myocardial infarction – in less than a half century. The ongoing research and examination of the HHP cohort has led to hundreds of studies, publications, and presentations, as well as considerable international recognition.

The HHP has been the basis of a long and successful research collaboration between PHRI and the Kuakini Medical Center, continuing to this day. It is the longest study of its kind with original participants, now ranging in age from 87 to 106, and the focus has shifted to healthcare issues of aging. A wealth of information has been gathered from throughout the lives of the study’s participants on diet, lifestyle, physical activity, and genetics, information that is crucial to understanding what helps people achieve a healthy old age.

The Family Blood Pressure Program (FBPP) and Genetic Determinants of Human Hypertension

Hawaii is the Administrative Coordinating Center for the SAPPHIRe network, one of four international networks studying the genetics of hypertension. These networks have recruited more than 10,000 sibling pairs for genetic linkage and association studies. In a second phase, new phenotypes, including left ventricular mass determined by echocardiography, are being examined.