A team of 150,000 Mexicans—100,000 women and 50,000 men—have been enrolled in a long-term health study that tracks their lifestyle, physical measurements, and genetic data over more than 15 years. This matters because Mexico faces a severe epidemic of obesity and diabetes, which in turn drives high rates of kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. Most large-scale studies of these conditions have been conducted in Western populations, leaving a critical gap in understanding how genetic and non-genetic risk factors interact specifically in Mexican adults. The Mexico City Prospective Study is now the largest such study in this population, with reliable cause-of-death follow-up and a new fieldwork programme to capture non-fatal diseases. If successful, the research will reveal how obesity, diabetes, and related risk factors—including genetic variants—inter-relate to cause premature illness and death. This could directly inform public health strategies and clinical guidelines tailored to Mexican and Mexican-American communities, potentially slowing the rise of diabetes-related complications and reducing the burden on healthcare systems.
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Experience in Western countries has shown that large population-based prospective studies are a valuable way of investigating many slow-acting causes of common chronic diseases. Over 15 years ago, we enrolled 150,000 Mexicans (100,000 women and 50,000 men) into the Mexico City Prospective Study (MCPS), asking them about their lifestyle, taking their physical measurements and storing their blood samples (allowing genetic variation to be measured). We have established reliable follow-up of cause-specific mortality and have recently reassessed a sample of 10k participants (predominantly to find out how risk factors change vary over time). We are also about to start a new programme of fieldwork to collect information on major non-fatal diseases that have occurred over the past 15 years. The MCPS is the largest prospective study that has been established among Mexicans (or Mexican Americans) and with >15 years of follow-up is now very well placed to examine the major genetic and non-genetic causes of disease in this population. In particular, a major problem in Mexico is obesity and diabetes (and, as a consequence, kidney disease and cardiovascular disease). Much of our future research will therefore be to investigate how obesity, diabetes and related risk factors (including genetic factors) inter-relate to cause premature morbidity and mortality in Mexican adults.
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