At a time when rural healthcare availability is under threat, the need for care in rural areas is proving greater than in urban areas.
Research has found rural residents have higher rates of chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes compared to those living in urban areas.
“Rural risk factors for health disparities include geographic isolation, lower socioeconomic status, higher rates of health risk behaviors, limited access to healthcare specialists and subspecialists and limited job opportunities,” according to the Rural Health Information Hub, a project of the Center or Rural Health located within the School of Medicine & Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota.
In a first of its kind study, “Rural health disadvantages in the United States,” the University of Illinois and USDA Economic Research Service tried to explain the rural mortality disadvantage by combining place-based analysis with health biomarkers from over 66,000 people across a 20-year span.
“We can combine those biomarkers with socioeconomic information and survey questions like age, education and if they are a veteran or not,” said Sarah Low, study author, professor and head of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois.
Loq said the research was done in a secure federal data lab in Washington, D.C. and was anonymized.
They included availability of grocery stores, health food stores, gyms, natural amenities like parks and recreation, per capita income per county and individual income.
The study looked at the toll that stress takes on the body’s organs, motivated by Low’s belief that people in rural areas are under more stress than people. For farmers, both husband and wife could be working full-time and taking care of children and elderly parents. Rural-specific factors that could raise stress levels include limited access to restaurants and grocery stores and lower quality or harder-to-access healthcare.
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