Opportunities for New Investigators
The ARIC cohort study is a prospective cardiovascular cohort study in four communities that began in the mid-1980s. The study includes 15,792 initially middle-aged Black and White adults followed for cardiovascular outcomes and other incident endpoints. The ARIC community surveillance study includes hospitalization data on myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease mortality (both in-hospital and out-of-hospital), and heart failure hospitalizations in adults in the four ARIC communities from 1987-2014.
New investigators are invited to become involved, by perusing our website and:
- Proposing a paper in collaboration with an ARIC investigator
- Proposing a paper using publicly available data, if you prefer to work independently (via https://biolincc.nhlbi.nih.gov/studies/aric/) (see also "Obtaining Data")
- Proposing an ancillary study
Note: ARIC data can also be accessed via BioLINCC free of charge and without the need for the ARIC Study approval. There may be some differences in the data available from BioLINCC, such as the removal of extreme values and the omission of restricted data. One such omitted set of data is CMS-linked data, due to more restrictive data-sharing permissions.
We also offer a free training on how to analyze ARIC Surveillance Data using R software, available on our How to do Surveillance Analyses page.
Four general caveats:
- ARIC already has over 2,700 publications and 4,000 manuscript proposals; thus, be sure you have a new idea.
- Stored samples that might be used for ancillary studies are limited in volume and number, and therefore studies involving biospecimens are reviewed by the Laboratory Committee and require sufficient and appropriate justification.
- Ancillary studies that include participant contact will require justification to ensure participant burden is minimized. It is important to work with investigators at field centers when developing ancillary study proposals that will include participant contact.
- Investigators are responsible for obtaining funding and support for ancillary studies requiring more than simple Coordinating Center help, such as advice on how to obtain data from participating ARIC sites or BioLINCC.
Getting started:
Besides reviewing the above resources, ARIC suggests that potential new investigators first contact a member of the Steering Committee to discuss their ideas. This will save time by clarifying the feasibility of the ideas and, for manuscripts, whether the topic has already been proposed.
Note: Manuscript topics for which there is already an approved but unpublished manuscript can be identified by searching the database of approved manuscript proposals. Contact an ARIC Investigator with access to the secure area of the website to ask about manuscript topics.