Deep In The Heart Of Bogalusa

By Laura L. Scholes
Photograph by Paula Burch

It's a Tuesday morning in late June in downtown Bogalusa, and it's already hot--that white, hazy heat that settles down hard on Louisiana come summer. And on Bogalusa's main drag, the heat seems to be taking its toll. A woman stands fanning herself vigorously in front of Touch of Class Auto Detailing. Two kids out of school for the summer wander listlessly, kicking at the rocks and gum wrappers that have accumulated in the gutters. Shirtless construction workers sweat as they throw sledgehammers into the side of the State Theater, finishing the work that neglect and time have begun. But inside 538 Columbia St., there is plenty of A/C and a flurry of activity. A distinct buzz is in the air because Dr. Berenson is coming in today. He's been on vacation for a couple of weeks and hasn't made his usual Tuesday visits to the main site of the Bogalusa Heart Study. The staff is itching to see him.

At 9:30, a slice of dusty, hot light breaks into the room and Gerald S. Berenson (B '43, M '45) enters--tall, imposing, with a shock of white hair. The buzz gets decidedly more animated when Berenson, handsome in his crisp blue and white seersucker suit, starts making the rounds to check in with everyone. Rita Clayton, a retired RN, giggles and shakes her head of tight gray curls when he warns her to make sure she gets those blood sample labels on right, a task she could do with her eyes closed now after 28 years. And Donna Lee, the on-site director of the study who has also been here since day one, rolls her eyes when Berenson scolds her for coming in on her first day back after a sick leave.

All the people who work at the Bogalusa Heart Study home office on Columbia Street--Lee, Clayton, Acy Hartfield, Frankie McMillan, James Daniels, Doris Byrd, Elizabeth Thomas and Everett Watson--love Berenson, who founded the landmark study in his hometown back when his hair was still as black as fresh asphalt and his glasses weren't yet bifocaled. There are pictures of the old days stapled and tacked on the Heart Study's paneled walls. There are pictures everywhere, in fact, that document three decades of community-based research, funded largely by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. But back in 1972, when that first grant was awarded, no one could have predicted that there would end up being so much of a story to tell. "We had no idea of the importance of the heart study when we started," says Berenson, who at 78 still exudes an energy that would wear out the average Gen-Xer. "We certainly didn't plan it that way. It took us three to five years to really begin to appreciate what we had started, and here we are close to 30 years later, still doing it."

Berenson adds that the story could not be told "without the unflagging efforts of many co-investigators and the wonderful team in Bogalusa. Our three community coordinators (Imogene Talley Barrisci, Betty Sul and Donna Lee) over the past 30 years were like angels."

The Bogalusa Heart Study is the only long-term community research project in the world with a biracial (African-American and Caucasian) population. In fact, much of the current thinking about what heart disease is and how we deal with it can be credited to Berenson's team and the research they've produced on the kids of this Louisiana town.

"There are no studies that are identical to it," says Berenson. "The other studies that have black/white populations do not have data from childhood; other studies that have children are all white, and the new Jackson Heart Study is all black adults. Very clearly, blacks have more high blood pressure, more kidney disease and more diabetes, and white men, particularly at a younger age, have more coronary heart disease. There is a tremendous power in looking at the biracial effect of heart disease. This has been a major strength of our study."

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