Rural areas are increasingly more vulnerable to preventable deaths than cities, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Not only are the 46 million U.S. rural dwellers older, poorer, more isolated from medical facilities, and more likely to be underinsured, they’re also falling behind cities in limiting smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and physical inactivity, Thursday’s study found.
The research adds to the data on rural areas, whose residents heavily support President Trump, that suggests they suffer economic anxiety and even are at risk of “deaths of despair.”
Thursday’s study examined data from 2010 to 2017, finding that the gap between rural and urban areas widened over that time frame for preventable deaths from cancer, heart diseases, and smoking. The study didn’t just look at rural and urban areas broadly but parsed the differences between very large cities and much more remote, rural areas.
It found that in large cities, deaths from cancer that were considered preventable fell from 17.9% in 2010 to 3.2% in 2017. But in very rural areas, deaths from cancer that could be considered preventable were at 28.7% in 2010 and only fell to 21.7% by 2017.
From 2010 to 2017, preventable deaths related to smoking fell from 23.4% to 13% in large cities, and in very rural areas they rose from 54.3% to 57.1%.
The only worsened health outcome for cities in comparison to rural areas was in preventable deaths from what are known as “unintentional injuries,” which means factors from poisonings to falls to car accidents and includes drug overdoses. Rural areas made little progress in that area over the eight-year period analyzed, but circumstances became far worse in cities, where deaths from drug overdoses surged.
In urban areas in 2010, 25.4% of deaths from unintentional injury were considered preventable compared with 47.8% of such deaths in 2017.
