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The George W. Comstock Center for Public Health Research and Prevention was established in 1962. It is located in Hagerstown, Maryland, the county seat of Washington County. There are two Research groups, one located in the Washington County Health Department and one in an office building on the Public Square of Hagerstown.
The Health Department unit was originally involved with training students and in collaborative studies with the local and state health departments. With the acquisition of the National Cancer Institute's cancer register in 1968 and the establishment of two large serum banks in 1974 and 1989, cancer studies became the major enterprise. More recently, this unit has become associated with several multi-site collaborative studies.
The Downtown unit started with the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study in 1987, one of four collaborative sites studying cardiovascular risk factors among persons aged 45-64 years of age. ARIC was followed two years later by the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), again with four collaborative sites. It was limited to persons over the age of 65 years. Participants in a third multi-site study, the sleep Heart Study (SHHS), were recruited from persons enrolled in either ARIC or CHS. In 2000, the Downtown unit became one of the sites for the Ginko Evaluation of Memory (GEM) study, a controlled trial of gingko biloba in the prevention and treatment of memory loss.
The two units of the Comstock Center form a loose confederation, with some degree of cohesion being provided by the fact that both are part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology.
At present, the primary function of both Units is research into causes and means of prevention of human disease, notably heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Both can offer consultation regarding community research, a base of operations, and a wealth of data for student and faculty research. Information from results of studies is used for epidemiology laboratory problems and basic data from three large populations, with all identifiers removed, is available for students to design case-control studies in the Epidemiology course 302-604. Both units collaborate with local health agencies to provide consultation with grouped population data for planning purposes.
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