Multiethnic Cohort Study

Synonyms

Cross-cultural cohort study

Definition

The Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) study was a prospective study which included people from Hawaii and California. It recruited people from the main cultural groups residing there – Native Hawaiians, African Americans, Latinos, Japanese Americans, and whites. In such MEC studies, researchers sample subgroups of people belonging to one of several preselected cultural groups. These groups were expected to have a different prevalence of a given disease, and the study aimed to investigate which risk factors accounted for such differences. The MEC study included over 215,000 men and women. Generally speaking, by running the study prospectively and simultaneously for all ethnic subgroups, effects of “historical events” (e.g., development of a new treatment for a disease, a known public figure develops an illness, or an infectious epidemic) occur for all participants at the same time. Furthermore, by conducting the study prospectively, researchers...