One of the highest adiposity burdens published for any country.

Why Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Kitts and Nevis records 46.5% adult obesity and 76.7% of adults overweight or obese — among the highest figures published anywhere in the world. Among adult women the overweight-or-obese figure reaches 83.4%. On prevalence alone it is an extraordinary population. On everything else it needs careful handling, and we set out the regulatory position plainly below.

The disease burden

Adult obesity reaches 55.1% in women and 37.0% in men — the male figure alone exceeds the national obesity rate of most countries in the network. Crude adult diabetes prevalence is 22.0% and hypertension 45.1%, with only 22.3% controlled.

Sites and infrastructure

• Joseph N. France General Hospital, Basseterre — 156 beds, the primary trauma facility
• Alexandra Hospital, Charlestown, Nevis — 52 beds, with CT
• Multiple offshore medical schools: University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Windsor University School of Medicine, St Theresa's Medical University, Medical University of the Americas
• Virscio — a GLP-compliant, AAALAC-accredited non-human primate research facility using the African green monkey model. Preclinical only; no human clinical research

Research heritage

Established preclinical research through the Virscio facility and the long-standing St Kitts vervet biomedical model. There is no positive human clinical research heritage, and there is a significant adverse history — see the regulatory note.

Regulatory & ethics

• No publicly identifiable functioning national research ethics committee
• Bodies named by government as the appropriate counterparties: Cabinet, Ministry of Health, Office of the Chief Medical Officer, and the St Kitts and Nevis Medical Board

The honest position: Saint Kitts and Nevis has no publicly identifiable functioning national research ethics committee and no clinical trial authorisation pathway. The bodies government has named as the appropriate counterparties are Cabinet, the Ministry of Health, the Office of the Chief Medical Officer and the Medical Board, and any study here requires written engagement with all of them plus an imported or CARPHA-facilitated ethics review. There is also specific research-governance history in this jurisdiction that we brief sponsors on directly at the start of any conversation rather than leaving it to be discovered. Ask us and we will walk you through it and through how we govern around it.

Data quality: Moderate on risk factors, absent on mortality — below the WHO Global Health Estimates population threshold, so no NCD mortality data is published.

How this site fits the network

Network capacity — adds diversity and marginal enrolment to multi-country studies. Not a standalone proposition.

Our Saint Kitts and Nevis operation is contracted, trained and monitored under the same quality system as our UK and US sites. One master service agreement covers all three regions, one budget negotiation, one set of payment terms. Sites in this network can absorb enrolment from under-recruiting UK or US centres without a new vendor qualification cycle.