Changes in Health Status Among Participants of The Framingham Heart Study from the 1960s to the 1990s: Application of an Index of Cumulative Deficits

The analyses show that the cumulative deficits approach might be an efficient tool for analyzing the effects of a large number of health characteristics for which the individual effects are small, inconsistent, or non-significant. They show favorable trends such that health of the Framingham studies participants either did not change or improved over time for the most serious small-effect traits.