Return to Decades of Research.

Roger Siervogel has spent decades studying generations of research participants.

As director of the Lifespan Health Research Center, part of the Department of Community Health in Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine, Siervogel leads a team of research scientists and thousands of loyal participants working together to gather a wealth of data that will help solve important health-related problems. The center's ongoing research includes several population studies to determine the impact of the risk factors for various diseases including obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diseases of aging. The center's research priorities also include genetic studies that examine how genes affect growth, health, and disease processes; public health research; and technology transfer to help make practical use of the new knowledge generated by the research.

Siervogel, a Brage Golding Distinguished Professor of Research, researches "Adiposity Disease Risk Factors and Lifetime Health" as part of center's Fels Longitudinal Study. This year marks the 29th anniversary of this NIH-funded research—Wright State"s longest running grant.

Physical growth and maturation were the key research areas of the study when the Fels Institute was started in 1929 as a private, nonprofit program to study the effects of the Great Depression on child development. Its initial research project, the longitudinal study from conception to adulthood, was designed to answer the question "What makes people different?" In 1977, the Institute was donated to Wright State's School of Medicine, and the Fels Longitudinal Study found a new home in what was to become the Lifespan Health Research Center.

It was under the directorship of Alex Roche that Siervogel was enticed to leave his visiting professorship in genetic epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and join the study's team, then located in Yellow Springs, Ohio. "Alex Roche had the vision to see the potential for genetics to play a role in the study, so I was brought onboard in 1974 to add a new dimension," said Siervogel. "Roche was an instrumental moving force in terms of getting the Fels study on the right track, getting research funding for it, and setting the direction that we have followed since he retired from WSU in 1994."

As the years have passed, the pool of Fels Longitudinal Study participants has grown. "The focus of the study was originally more centered on childhood growth. But as the Fels participants aged, we shifted focus to include other kinds of research," Siervogel said. "The emphasis has evolved to include risk factors for common diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and others. We try to identify genes that contribute to the disease process in some way."

The first participants were enrolled prenatally in 1929 and are now in their mid-seventies. In addition to the very first volunteers, now their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are part of the study, coming into the center at regular intervals for testing. Just shy of 80 years old, the Fels Longitudinal Study is the longest running serial study of its kind in the world.

"Independent of the Fels Longitudinal Study, my very first NIH grant in 1976 was a totally new study called Genetics of Hypertension," said Siervogel, who became director of the Lifespan Health Research Center in 1992. "That study later became the Southwest Ohio Family Study and is active today in genetic studies of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis."

When Siervogel trained his scientific eye on his own family, it was the familial tendency towards cardiovascular disease that he saw in his future. What he couldn't know was that his future was to be impacted by an unexpected, rare disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. Also called motor neuron disease, the gradual death of the nerve cells responsible for controlling voluntary muscles leads to muscle loss, paralysis, and eventually death.

"My future now is really circumscribed by the increasing disabilities that come with ALS. I'm glad that I will be stepping down from my position as director at a high point. In the last two years our annual research funding has reached over $5.5 million, up from under one million in 1990. Thanks to the people I surround myself with, I feel like the center has done well on my watch," said Siervogel, who will leave the leadership of the center to a new director but plans to continue directing the projects on which he is the principal investigator, as his health allows.

"My most recent grant was written and funded after my diagnosis in June of 2003," said Siervogel. "Once you get past the initial shock (of learning you have ALS), you decide whether you are going to make the most of the rest of your life, and that is what I am doing. It's not for me to lament what might have been, but to enjoy what I have today."