Admin Support
      Services

Presented by: Julie E. Buring,
ScD, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Deputy Director, Division of Preventive Medicine Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

Topic:  "Aspirin and Vitamin E in the Primary
              Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease:
             The Women's Health Study"

Abstract:
Randomized trials have shown that low-dose aspirin decreases the risk of a first myocardial infarction in men, with little effect on the risk of ischemic stroke and few data directly in women. For vitamin E, while there are suggestive data from basic research and observational studies, there have been few trials of long duration or in primary prevention. To address these questions, 39,876 initially healthy female health professionals 45 years of age or older were randomized into the Women's Health Study in a 2x2 factorial design, receiving 100 mg of aspirin on alternate days or placebo and 600 IU of natural-source vitamin E on alternate days or placebo, and followed for cardiovascular disease and cancer for an average of 10.1 years. The cardiovascular results of this trial for both aspirin and vitamin E will be given in this presentation.

Bio for Julie E. Buring, ScD
Dr. Julie E. Buring is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Deputy Director of the Division of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Director of Research of the Harvard Medical School Osher Institute, Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies.  Dr. Buring is also Professor of Epidemiology at both the Harvard and Boston University Schools of Public Health.  She received her BA in mathematics from Pomona College in Claremont, California in 1971; a masters degree in biostatistics from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1975; a doctorate in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1983; and an honorary doctorate in science from Pomona College in 2001.

Dr. Buring’s research focuses on the epidemiology of chronic disease, primarily cardiovascular disease and cancer, and especially among women.  She is involved in a number of large-scale clinical trials or observational cohort studies of the prevention of these diseases.  She was Principal Investigator of the just completed Women’s Health Study, a large-scale randomized trial of the benefits and risks of low-dose aspirin and vitamin E in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer, conducted among 40,000 female health professionals, and is Principal Investigator of the extended follow-up of the participants.  In addition, Dr. Buring is Co-Principal Investigator of the Women’s Antioxidant Cardiovascular Study (evaluating the benefits of antioxidant therapy among 8,000 women with a history of cardiovascular disease), the Physicians’ Health Study II (a randomized trial of vitamins E, C, beta-carotene and a multivitamin currently ongoing among 15,000 male physicians), and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Vanguard Center of the Women’s Health Initiative, which is evaluating low-fat diet, postmenopausal hormones, and calcium/vitamin E supplementation among 70,000 women nationwide. 

Dr. Buring is actively involved in the teaching and training of students and fellows in epidemiology, both nationally and internationally, and is Director of an NIH T32 training grant in the Epidemiology of Aging.  She is co-author of a widely used introductory textbook, Epidemiology in Medicine.