Benjamín Acosta-Cázares Earns Distinguished Alumni Award for Health Data Work for Latin American Populations

When Benjamín Acosta-Cázares arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in 1996, he had already gathered much knowledge about studying health patterns. However, it was at Pitt where he said he gained the confidence needed to soon after, establish the largest national health database in Hispanic populations in Mexico and the world.

 

Nearly two decades later, Pitt is recognizing that effort. Acosta-Cázares this month received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health.

 

“The epidemiology program here for me was great. It was like the American dream of epidemiology,” said Acosta-Cázares of his time at Pitt. “This award, this recognition of my work, is important to me. All the skills and abilities I have today and my knowledge of methodological issues are because of my time in the Graduate School of Public Health.”

 

The aforementioned database has systematically complied health surveys for over 800,000 people, measuring obesity rates, drug use, sociodemographic risk factors and diabetes prevalence among other heath factors for Hispanic populations.

 

“He’s very deserving (of the award),” said Emma Barinas-Mitchell, associate professor of epidemiology at Pitt, who wrote a letter of support for Acosta-Cázares to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award. “It’s a big undertaking to do the work he’s done in Mexico. It involves a lot of collaboration and having a sense of the big picture.”

 

Barinas-Mitchell was in the same epidemiology program as Acosta-Cázares.

 

“We were introduced to each other, because I was working on similar registry research in Miami. We also both speak Spanish, so that was nice since there weren’t a lot of people up here who spoke Spanish,” she said.

 

Acosta-Cázares today is a professor of epidemiology at the Mexican Institute of Social Security, where he was previously head of strategic information. It was here in 2002 where his expertise was sought to compile the database for Mexico’s population.

 

The national authorities of the Mexican Institute of Social Security started a strategy called Integrated Health Programs, which changed the traditional focus of health programs from a prevention of specific diseases and risks, to a protection of the health of population groups. Acosta-Cázares was designated the leader for the design, planning and execution of the database consisting of health institutional surveys that complemented the usual information systems.

“They (institute) wanted an electronic database that listed preventative actions for health factors. Our first survey had about 80,000 people respond,” he said. “I think it was the first of its kind in Mexico, and we’re only talking about 15 years ago.”

 

Because of that, his Ph.D. track at Pitt was not complete until 2015 when he finally gave his doctoral dissertation.

 

As more surveys were sent out to feed the database, more people in Mexico and other Latin American countries responded. While US researchers have a plethora of resources to work with for survey studies like this, Acosta-Cázares and his small team worked with limited resources.

 

“It was amazing to see,” he said. “Soon after, researchers wanted to collaborate with us based on these results.”

 

Because of the data collected over the years by Acosta-Cázares and his team, other researchers have been able to conduct studies such as one published in 2019 in Nature, where it was found that rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults. The team based this on population data from 190 countries, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults.

 

In a 2016 study published in The Lancet, the data was used to examine trends in mean body-mass index from 1975 to 2014. The research team there used 1,698 population-based data sources, with more than 19.2 million adult participants in 186 of 200 countries for which estimates were made.

 

“These are things I wish I would have done,” said Ron Laporte, professor emeritus of epidemiology at Pitt. Laporte was one of Acosta-Cázares’ professors and mentors while the latter was pursuing his Ph.D. at the University.

 

Laporte first met Acosta-Cázares in the ‘80s in Mexico City after collaborators at the Social Security institute suggested sending the latter to Pitt.

 

“I was very impressed with him. So, we basically invited him to work in the area on creating the first global health network with NASA and the internet. And this was the early days of the internet,” Laporte said. “He’s an incredibly trustworthy and nice person.”

 

“For me, it was amazing to have these high-level professors at Pitt,” Acosta-Cázares said. “They trusted in me, and that allowed me to do these big things.”