The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (abbreviated as the CARDIA study) is an ongoing, observational, longitudinal cohort study in the United States, examining the development of, and risk factors for, cardiovascular disease.
[3] The CARDIA study began in 1985 and 1986 with a sample of 5,115 black and white adults between the ages of 18 and 30.
When the study began, participants were selected to ensure that the total sample would be about equally distributed across race, age, sex, and education.
[1] The original participants were recruited from Birmingham, Alabama, Chicago, Illinois, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Oakland, California.
[1] By 2016, the study had produced hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles that had been cited thousands of times in total.