Data from the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) have been de-identified and are available for use by students and faculty at the University of Maine.

Funded by the National Institutes for Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), and the National Institute on Aging, the MSLS study is a multidisciplinary study relating cardiovascular risk factors and disease to cognitive function. Merrill F. Elias, Ph.D., M.P.H. is director of the MSLS, alongside and Michael A. Robbins, Ph.D. as co-director, and Susan P. Elias, PhD as Associate Director for Archiving.

The MSLS has a rich data base. There are up to seven longitudinal waves of data available for over 1,000 community participants and cross-sectional data are available for 2,472 study participants. These data include risk factors for cardiovascular disease, data on cardiovascular disease, clinical cognitive performance measures, and personality and lifestyle measures. Recent waves of the study include many psychosocial variables, demographic variables, information on medications, and extensive data on cardiovascular risk factors and events such as diabetes, stroke, obesity, smoking, homocysteine, APOE-e4 genotype, nutrition, and physical activity. For more information about the study, please visit the MSLS Research Website.

The MSLS data are available to students and faculty of UM as well as other investigators who would wish to use them for research purposes. The research purposes must meet requirements set by the directors for use of these data.

Please contact Susan Elias, Cooperating Research Faculty Associate in Psychology at UM, for the specifics of these requirements and for other information about this archival data set (susan.elias@maine.edu).