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.

Since its inception, PREHCO has been funded with federal funds from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). From 2000-2009, it was a project between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico. PREHCO was designed as a study comparable to the Multicenter Project on Health and Well-being of Older Adults in Latin America and the Caribbean (SABE) developed by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in several cities in Latin America, and with some studies carried out in the United States, mainly the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The third wave of PREHCO was developed between 2021-2022 as a collaboration between the University of Alabama in Birmingham and the University of Puerto Rico.

Each dataset contains a CASEID variable which may be used for linking/merging. When using PREHCO Wave 1 or 2 data including the spouses as independent records (only targets were included in waves 3 and 4), the variable TYPE must be used in the equation (1=target, 2=spouse) since both respondent types share the CASEID. Please reference the study documentation for detailed dataset information.

More information can be found by visiting the project websites: