Health Conditions of Elderly Puerto Ricans

This is a continuation project to implement a second wave of the Puerto Rican Elderly Health Study (PREHCO). We propose to field a second round with survivors of the sample interviewed in the first wave. In this second wave we plan to collect information on changes in health, functional limitations, depression, cognition and mortality as well as on family and residential arrangement transitions, familial and non familial transfers, fluctuations in income and assets and, finally, labor force status changes. The study is also designed to link data from the two waves with the National Death Index, to the registry of birth certificates maintained in municipalities, to the 2000 Census files, and to ancillary information from the Department of Health and Human Services. Analytically, the project is motivated by four problem areas. All four have been the foundation of PREHCO since its inception but acquire renewed saliency in light of preliminary analyses of the first wave of data: (a) investigation of uniformly high age and sex-specific prevalence of obesity and self-reported diabetes (type II); (b) investigation of race differentials in measures of health and functional status, (c) assessment of conjectures posing a relation between health and functional limitations of older cohorts and their early childhood experiences of malnutrition and disease; (d) health, functional status and mortality differentials across socioeconomic levels and among individuals with and without migrant experiences in the US.