Diabetes deaths declined almost everywhere in the U.S. in past two decades, but stay the same in the rural South - Entrepreneur Generations

A newly published study from the Texas A&M School of Public Health found that, while mortality rates from diabetes have improved in most parts of the country over the past 20 years, they've remained almost unchanged in the rural South.

As the seventh-highest cause of death in the nation, diabetes continues to be a significant health challenge in the U.S. "Rural Healthy People 2020," a decade-long report of rural health goals published by the university, identifies diabetes as the third-most important public health issue in rural areas, where diagnosis rates can be as much as 17 percent higher than in suburban and urban areas. As of 2015, 30 million Americans have diabetes and another 84 million were pre-diabetic, Rae Lynn Mitchell reports for Texas A&M's health news publication.

The study's lead researcher, Texas A&M School of Public Health assistant professor Timothy Callaghan, told Mitchell that diabetes is most likely more common in rural areas because of a lack of diabetes education, different training for health care professionals, and/or lack of access to health care, though he cautioned that the study does not establish causality. He also speculated that the lack of health care access could be due to many Southern states' decision not to expand Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The research studied publicly available data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1999 to 2016.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2HbX7tp Diabetes deaths declined almost everywhere in the U.S. in past two decades, but stay the same in the rural South - Entrepreneur Generations

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