Framingham SNP Health Association Resource (SHARe)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?id=phs000007

Startup of Framingham Heart Study. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death and serious illness in the United States. In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) — under the direction of the National Heart Institute (now known as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NHLBI) — embarked on a novel and ambitious project in health research. At the time, little was known about the general causes of heart disease and stroke, but the death rates for CVD had been increasing steadily since the beginning of the century and had become an American epidemic. The objective of the FHS was to identify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to CVD by following its development over a long period of time in a large group of participants who had not yet developed overt symptoms of CVD or suffered a heart attack or stroke.

Framingham Heart Study SHARe Genome-Wide Association Study. In 2007, the FHS entered a new phase with the conduct of genotyping for the FHS SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource) project, for which genotyping is conducted using approximately 550,000 SNPs (Affymetrix 500K mapping array plus Affymetrix 50K supplemental array) in over 9,300 subjects from the three generations of subjects (including over 900 families). The SHARe database is housed at NCBI’s dbGaP and will contain all 550,000 SNPs as well as SNP and microsatellite genotyping conducted previously in the FHS. The phenotype database will contain a vast array of phenotype information available in all three generations. These will include the quantitative measures of the major risk factors such as systolic blood pressure, total and HDL cholesterol, fasting glucose, and cigarette use, as well as anthropomorphic measures such as body mass index, biomarkers such as fibrinogen and CRP, and electrocardiography measures such as the QT interval. Many of these measures have been collected repeatedly in the original and Offspring cohorts. Also included in the SHARe database will be an array of recently collected biomarkers, subclinical disease imaging measures, clinical CVD outcomes as well as an array of ancillary studies. The unflagging commitment of the research participants in the NHLBI FHS has made more than a half century of research success possible. For decades, the FHS has made its data and DNA widely available to qualified investigators throughout the world through the Limited Access Datasets and the FHS DNA Committee, and the SHARe database will continue that tradition by allowing access to qualified investigators who agree to the requirements of data access. With the SHARe database, we continue with an ambitious research agenda and look forward to new discoveries in the decades to come. This has been added to Biological Informatics Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.