Rural Americans – especially men – should live a much shorter and less healthy life than their urban counterparts, according to our research, recently Posted in the Journal of Rural Health.
We found that a 60 -year -old man living in a rural area should live on average two years less than an urban man. For women, the rural-urban gap is six months.
A key reason is worse rates among rural people for smoking, obesity and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. These conditions condemn millions of people with disabilities and shorten lives.
In addition, these same people live in areas where medical care evaporates. Living in rural areas, with their relatively sparse populations, often means a shortage of doctorslonger travel distances for medical care and Inadequate investments in public healthpartly drawn by the decline in economic opportunities.
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Our team get to these results using a simulation called Future elderly model. With this, we were able to simulate the future career of the life of Americans at 60 living in an urban or rural area.
The model is based on the relationships observed in 20 years of data Health and retirement studyAn underway investigation that follows 51 -year -old people in the rest of their lives. More specifically, the model has shown how long these Americans could live, the expected quality of their future years and how certain lifestyle changes would affect the results.
We describe the conditions that stimulate our results as “despair diseases”, building the historical work of pioneering researchers who invented the term now widely used “Debt of despair. “They documented Growing mortality among Americans without a university degree And linked these deaths to the decline in social and economic perspectives.
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The main causes of death of despair – medication overdoses, liver disease and suicide – have also been called “despair diseases”. But the conditions we are studying, such as heart disease, could also be influenced by social and economic perspectives. And they can Deeply reduce quality of life.
We also found that if the levels of rural education were as high as in urban areas, this would eliminate almost half of the rural-urban gap. Our data shows that 65% of young people aged 60 were educated beyond the school, compared to 53% of rural residents of the same age.
One of the possible reasons for the difference is that obtaining a baccalaureate can make a person more capable or willing to follow scientific recommendations – and more likely to train for 150 minutes per week or eat their vegetables as their doctor advises him.
Rural communities are increasingly hampered by their lack of access to health care.
Why it matters
The gap between the results of urban and rural health has extended in recent decades. However, the problem goes beyond the disparities between urban and rural health: it also divides some of the lines of the party and social divisions that separate American citizens, such as education and lifestyle.
Scholarship Decline of rural America suggests that people living outside the big cities are full of resentment towards economic forces which may have eroded their economic power. The interaction between these forces and the health conditions that we study is less appreciated.
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Economic circumstances can contribute to health results. For example, an increase in stress and sedentary lifestyle due to Unemployment can contribute to chronic health problems like cardiovascular disease. Decrease in economic prospects Due to automation And Liberalization of exchanges are linked to the increase in mortality.
But health can also have a strong influence on economic results. Hospitalizations provoke high medical costsLoss of work and gains, and increased bankruptcy. The start of chronic diseases and disability can lead to Sustainable income drops. Even experienced health events early in childhood may have economic consequences of decades later.
In tandem, these health and economic trends could strengthen each other and help fuel inequalities between rural and urban areas that produce a deeply different quality of life.
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Which is still not known
It should be noted that our results, as many studies, describe on average the results; The rural population is not a monolith. In fact, some of the most active and most healthy people we know live in rural areas.
How much your location affects your health Current research field. But as researchers are starting to understand better, we can find strategies to promote health among all Americans, no matter where they live.
This article is republished from The conversation Under a creative communs license. Read it original article.