Minor children and adult care exchanges with community-dwelling frail elders in a St. Lucian village.

OBJECTIVE: Research on care of community-dwelling frail elders typically includes formal health service providers and adult members of the informal care system. Involvement of children and adolescents with elder care is largely undocumented. The aim of this article is to describe children's involvement in elder care. These findings are part of an ethnographic community study that examined common Western assumptions about elder care in a St. Lucian village. METHODS: Data were obtained in a four-phase, 5-year, community-based ethnographic field study that included in-depth network analysis of elder households. RESULT: One hundred eighty-eight informal caregivers assisted 14 elder networks in obtaining the things they needed to live through provision of 355 care activities. Forty-five children (ages 3(1/2) to 16) provided 111 of 355 (31%) care activities. The frail elders gave adults and children community member caregivers 196 and 94 benefits, respectively. DISCUSSION: Minor children are integrally involved in reciprocal exchanges for elder care in this village. Although they do not provide all of the same care activities as adults, they clearly assist elders, especially with running errands. Elders emphasized different motivational mechanisms for involving minor children and adults in their care networks.

Obesity in peoples of the African diaspora

People of African descent in the Caribbean and the USA originated from the Bight of Benin in West Africa. Although these population share a common genetic heritage, they now live under different socioeconomical conditions. Assuming genetic similarity, a cross-cultural examination of these peoples in West Africa, the Caribbean and the USA may attenuate the effect of genetic factors and allow the assessment of environmental contributions to a biological outcome. We carried out an epidemiological survey to determine the prevalence of hypertension and the contribution of risk factors to the variation in blood pressure of adults in Nigeria, Cameroon, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Barbados and the USA. In urban populations there was a trend toward increasing weight, height, body mass index, and proportions of those overweight and obese going from West Africa to the USA, with the Caribbean being intermediate. The prevalence of hypertension lay on a similar gradient. Given a common genetic susceptibility, urbanization and western acculturation are therefore associated with increasing hypertension and obesity.(AU)