The Spokane Heart Study (SHS), based in Spokane, Washington, is a longitudinal study currently in its 14th year. The SHS investigates traditional and emerging cardiovascular risk factors over time in an initially asymptomatic sample (Time 1 n = 1156; 59.1% male; mean age = 47.86). Detailed assessments of lifestyle (i.e. exercise, smoking, dietary habits), psychological (i.e. depression, anger expression, stress, health locus of control), and physiological variables (i.e. blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, glucose, total coronary artery calcification score) are conducted at two year intervals. The SHS enables researchers to conduct a multitiude of critical health anaylses: predictive values of traditional and non-traditional risk factors of heart disease, structural equation modeling (SEM) of health processes, growth trajectories of risk factors and health outcomes over the 14 year period, psychometric analyses of health and psychological scales, including across groups (i.e. gender) and occasion invariance testing, etc.
