Elizabeth Barrett-Connor

Barrett-Connor was born in Evanston, Illinois.[1] She was the only child of Florence Hershey and William Barrett. Her father was a chemical engineer, and working in ammunition companies.[1] She grew up in Lee, Massachusetts, and learned to read with her grandmother, who was a postal worker.[1] As a child she saw Leonard Bernstein in orchestra and attended the Northfield Preparatory School.[2] Barrett-Connor studied zoology at Mount Holyoke College and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[1] She graduated in 1956.[3] In 1960 she earned her medical degree at Cornell University, before completing her internal medicine residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.[4] Her early work studied the diarrhea of United States students in Mexico.[5] Barrett-Connor was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.[1] She earned a diploma in the Clinical Medicine of the Tropics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1965.[2] She moved to the University of Miami as an infectious disease epidemiologist.[2]

Barrett-Connor specialised in healthy ageing and women's health.[4] In particular, she championed studying cardiovascular disease in women as well as men.[2] She was recruited to the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1972.[1] In 1972 Barrett-Connor founded the Rancho Bernardo Heart and Chronic Disease Study (RBS), which involved over 6,000 people in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego.[6] For the study, Barrett-Connor recruited people from Rancho Bernardo, and studied the connection between lipids and heart disease.[6] She managed to recruit almost 70% of the Rancho Bernardo population.[1] She selected the area as it was reported as having a healthy population. She has collected data for over forty years, including frozen blood samples, and transcends changes in lifestyle and cholesterol.[6] She investigated how family history, fat distribution, cholesterol, physical activity and cigarette smoking impact chronic diseases.[6] Barrett-Connor used the RBS to study sex differences in cardiovascular disease.[7] As of 2011, one third of the participants still reported on their health, and half still have health tests at the Bernado Center Drive Clinic.[6]

Barrett-Connor identified many aspects of women's health, including that women with diabetes have a high triglyceride and that diabetes eliminates women's protection against cardiovascular disease.[2][8][9] It included innovative techniques to assess bone density, demonstrating that low calcium can result in hip fracture.[10] She also showed that smoking during middle age can result in osteoporosis, and that drinking coffee can result in low bone mineral density.[11][12]

Alongside RBS, Barrett-Connor led the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study.[13] She was also interested in overlooked issues in men's health, including osteoporosis, and was involved with the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study and Testosterone Trials.[2] In 1971 Barrett-Connor established the UCSD Epidemiology and Biostatistics Course.[2]

Her approach to storing blood samples to investigate new hypotheses at a later date was adopted by the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition and the UK Biobank study.[2]

Barrett-Connor was married to James Connor, a paediatrician at the University of California, San Diego. She had three children, Jonathan, Caroline and Steven as well as two-step children, James-Davis and Susan.[1] Barrett-Connor died on June 10, 2019.[1]