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By tapping into the perspectives of older adults and their caregivers, the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA) helps inform the public, health care providers, policymakers, and advocates on issues related to health, health care and health policy affecting Americans 50 years of age and older.

The poll is designed as a recurring, nationally representative household survey of U.S. adults, which allows assessment of issues in a timely fashion.

Launched in spring 2017, the NPHA is modeled after the highly successful University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health. The NPHA grew out of a strong interest in aging-related issues among many members of the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI), which brings together more than 600 faculty who study health, health care and the impacts of health policy. IHPI directs the poll which is sponsored by AARP and Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan academic medical center.

More waves of the NPHA data can be found on the NACDA-OAR site:

• National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA), [United States], October 2017
• National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA), [United States], March 2018
• National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA), [United States], October 2018
• National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA), [United States], May 2019

The various waves of NPHA represent separate samples of participants and cannot be joined or merged.

These are the third and fourth waves of the PREHCO project (Puerto Rican Elder Health Conditions study) and have been developed between 2021 and 2024 as a collaboration between the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Puerto Rico. The project began as a cross-sectional study of the non-institutionalized population aged 60 years or older in Puerto Rico. These waves followed the survivors of the original participants at the beginning of the fieldwork and aimed to examine the predictors of cognitive decline, disability, and mortality. The fourth wave of this study extends the follow-up of PREHCO to between 21 and 22 years after the initial data collection and aims to examine the predictors of cognitive decline, disability, and mortality.

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).

For this purpose, a questionnaire was designed that included sections on health conditions, physical and mental disability, functionality, use of medicines, health needs and social services, access to and use of health services, abuse, migration, housing conditions, patterns of help from family, community and public and government agencies, and others.

Since its inception, PREHCO has been funded with federal funds from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Initially it was a project between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico from 2000-2009.