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Frank E. Speizer, MD, of the Channing Laboratory, this month received the first annual Health Breakthrough Award presented by Ladies’ Home Journal. The women’s magazine, which has been published since 1883, honored Speizer in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the Nurses’ Health Study, the largest ongoing health study to focus on women.
“I don’t think I realized how successful it would become,” said Speizer, who established the study in 1976 to assess risk factors for major chronic diseases in women. “But there are more and more health events occurring among these women as they get older. We have 30-plus years of data; the information becomes more valuable as time goes on.”
The Nurses’ Health Study observed whether oral contraceptive use affected a woman’s health. The study found that the pill moderately increases breast cancer risk; however, this effect goes away when a woman stops taking it. Speizer is the study’s founding principal investigator, while Graham Colditz, MD, is its current principal investigator. In 1989, Walter Willett, MD, a professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and BWH, started Nurses’ Health Study II for further study of oral contraceptive use among younger women and to look at how their diet and lifestyle affected their disease risk. Willett also received the Health Breakthrough Award from Ladies’ Home Journal.
Speizer and Willett were honored along with five other doctors and researchers at the Health Breakthrough Awards Luncheon in New York City Aug. 2. They will be featured in the magazine’s September issue.