Harvard Nurses Health Study[哈佛护士健康研究]

哈佛护士健康研究简报2000-2008年关于记忆力衰退、直肠癌、乳腺癌、骨质疏松、糖尿病等最新最权威的健康研究成果，有很多颠覆性的饮食建议，如：

适当饮酒可以减缓记忆力的衰退
适当摄入钙质有助于阻止直肠癌的发生
饮用牛奶从长期看并不能阻挡骨质疏松，更有效的方式是多食用富含维生素D的蔬菜，晒太阳多锻炼等等

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The Nurses' Health Study was established by Dr. Frank Speizer in 1976 with funding from the National Institutes of Health. The primary motiviation in starting the NHS was to investigate the potential long term consequences of the use of oral contraceptives, a potent drug that was being prescribed to hundreds of millions of normal women.

Registered nurses were selected to be followed prospectively. We anticipated because of their nursing education, they would be able to respond with a high degree of accuracy to brief, technically-worded questionnaires and would be motivated to participate in a long term study.

Married registered nurses who were aged 30 to 55 in 1976, who lived in the 11 most populous states and whose nursing boards agreed to supply the study with their members' names and addresses were enrolled in the cohort if they responded to our baseline questionnaire. The original states were California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Approximately 122,000 nurses out of the 170,000 mailed responded. Every two years cohort members receive a follow-up questionnaire with questions about diseases and health-related topics including smoking, hormone use and menopausal status.

Because we recognized that diet and nutrition would play important roles in the development chronic diseases, in 1980, the first food frequency questionnaire was collected. Subsequent diet questionnaires were collected in 1984, 1986 and every four years since.

At the request of some of the nurses and with the addition of investigators to the research team interested in quality of life issues, question related to quality-of-life were added in 1992 and repeated every four years.

Because certain aspects of diet cannot be measured by questionnaire, particularly minerals that become incorporated in food from the soil in which it is grown, the nurses submitted 68,000 sets of toenail samples between the 1982 and 1984 questionnaires.

Similarly, to identify potential biomarkers, such as hormone levels and genetic markers, 33,000 blood samples were collected in 1989-90 followed by second samples from 18,700 of these participants in 2000-01. These samples are stored and used in case/control analyses.

As of this writing, response rates to our questionnaires are at 90% for each two-year cycle.