How one health study, inspired by FDR's death, changed life in America forever
In 1949, Carla Rollins' grandparents volunteered for a research study designed to better understand the disease that had killed President Franklin ...
In 1949, Carla Rollins' grandparents volunteered for a research study designed to better understand the disease that had killed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt just four years earlier. Back then, there was some suspicion that high blood pressure might be unhealthy. But Roosevelt's doctor didn't consider the President's rising blood pressure problematic until a few months before his April 1945 stroke. Even then, the doctor had no good tools to bring it down. Cardiovascular disease had become the leading cause of death in the United States by the late 40s, but little was known about how to prevent or treat it.