Puerto Rican Elder: Health Conditions (PREHCO) Project Series

The Puerto Rican Elder: Health Conditions (PREHCO) series reflects an ongoing longitudinal data collection of respondents aged 60 and older living in Puerto Rico. The series began with an island-wide sample, surveying target individuals and their spouses, resulting in three waves of data collection: 2002-2003; 2006-2007; 2021-2022.

PREHCO investigates a wide range of issues affecting the elder population in Puerto Rico, including health status, functionality, labor history, migration, income, physical and mental disability, use of medicines, access to and use of health services, abuse, housing conditions, and patterns of help from various sources.

• Wave 1 (2002-2003) - 4,291 persons 60 years or older and 1,442 spouses were interviewed (1,042 of the latter being 60 years or older).
• Wave 2 (2006-2007) - Follow-up survey of the same participants from Wave 1, in which 3,891 target interviews and 1,260 spouse interviews were completed. The deceased and institutionalized participants were also interviewed using a proxy.
• Wave 3 (2021-2022) - This wave followed the survivors of the 1,299 original participants at the beginning of the fieldwork and aimed to examine the predictors of cognitive decline, disability, and mortality. In the third wave, 958 participants were interviewed directly or through an informant proxy, of the estimated 1,299 alive at the beginning of the field work.