A recent Chicago Tribune article reported on the largest survey, ever, involving American teenagers—440,000 to be exact. The survey was administered back in 1960 and it took 2 and a half days to complete. The students who were given the survey attended 1,353 public schools across the country. The test results would later turn out to be an invaluable tool for predicting the likeliness of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
One student who took the test was Joan Levin, age 15. She attended Parkville Senior High School in Maryland. Levin told the Chicago Tribune, “We knew at the time that they were going to follow up for a long time, but she thought that meant about 20 years.
Today, 58 years after the tests were administered to high school students, the results are being used by researchers in various studies. Most recently, they’ve been used to study…
