by Joyce Frieden: Click through for the full post…
Death rate vs urban areas continues to widen for cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and stroke.
Americans living in rural areas had higher rates of preventable premature mortality from the five leading causes of death than those living in urban areas during the years 2010-2022, and the divide only appears to be growing, a CDC analysis showed.
During this period, the mortality gap between the most rural and most urban U.S. counties decreased for unintentional injury but increased for cancer, heart disease, chronic lower respiratory disease (CLRD), and stroke, according to researchers led by Macarena Garcia, DrPH, a senior health scientist at CDC’s Office of Rural Health.
“When assessed by the six urban-rural county classifications, percentages of preventable premature deaths in the most rural counties (noncore) were consistently higher than in the most urban counties (large central metropolitan and fringe metropolitan) for the five leading causes of death during the study period,” they wrote in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reportopens in a new tab or window.
The gap in all-cause mortality between rural and urban areas of the U.S. has continued to widen over the past few decades, the authors noted in their introduction.
“In 1999, the death rate in rural areas was 7% higher than in urban areas; by 2019, it was 20% higher,” said Garcia and colleagues, noting that structural factors like lower socioeconomic status and limited access to healthcare providers have been shown to play a role. In addition, “because each of the five leading causes of death is age-related, these conditions are more prevalent in rural areas of the United States where residents typically are older than their urban counterparts.”
