Health Care Marketplace | Kaiser Permanente Launches Long-Term Project To Collect Genetic Data on Members - Kaisernetwork.org

Health Care Marketplace Kaiser Permanente Launches Long-Term Project To Collect Genetic Data on Members - Kaisernetwork.org:

"the Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health -- include cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, asthma, diabetes and reproductive problems (Peyton Dahlberg, Sacramento Bee, 2/15). Similar studies are 'planned or are under way in Great Britain, Iceland, Japan and Estonia, but the Kaiser membership study appears to stand out both for its size and ethnic diversity in the United States,' the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Hall, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/15)."

This is a massive study dealing with heart disease.

Heart disease rate in the US on the rise

Heart Disease on the Rise

Heart disease rate in the US on the rise: "Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the United States for the past 80 years ( 1) and is a major cause of disability. Heart disease also results in substantial health-care expenditures; for example, coronary heart disease is projected to cost an estimated $151.6 billion in direct and indirect costs in 2007 ( 2). Although some self-reported national data are available ( 3), state-specific prevalence data for heart disease have not been reported previously. In addition, although racial/ethnic, geographic, and sex differences in death rates for heart disease have been documented ( 4,5), less information has been available regarding the prevalence of persons living with heart disease. To estimate the prevalence of myocardial infarction (MI) and angina/coronary heart disease (CHD) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia (DC), Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), CDC analyzed self-reported data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).* This report summarizes the results of that analysis and provides the first state-based prevalence estimates of these heart diseases."