Rural people more likely to die from colon cancer

Rural people with colon cancer are more likely to be diagnosed late and receive inferior treatment than their urban counterparts, according to a new University of Minnesota study. Rural colon cancer sufferers are also more likely to die from the disease. This is the first study of its kind to show that outcomes in colon cancer are affected by where a person lives, Tiffany Chao reports for ABC News.

The study focussed on more than 100,000 patients diagnosed with colon cancer from 1996 to 2008, with rural people making up 15 percent of the total. Rural patients were 4 percent more likely to get a late diagnosis, had 17 percent lower odds of receiving chemotherapy and had an 18 percent lower chance of getting lymph nodes removed during cancer-removal surgery, indicating that their treatment was most likely inadequate. Overall, rural patients were 5 percent more likely to die from colon cancer. (Read more)

Study: Rural people more likely to get Alzheimer's

Rural residents are twice as likely to get Alzheimer's, according to a University of Edinburgh study that collected "all over the world and spanned several decades," Nikki Tucker of Medical Daily reports. Researchers say limited access to health care, exposure to unknown substances, and socioeconomic factors may lead to the increased risk.

Prior studies have analyzed the difference in what effects rural and urban areas might have on the disease, but because of debate about what constitutes "rural" and "urban," results have been deemed inconclusive. (Read more) The study was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Female lives in 622 rural and exurban counties, nearly 1/4 of total, shortened from 1999 to 2009

The life expectancy of the average U.S. female increased 1.7 years from 1999 to 2009 -- 79.6 to 81.3 years.  Good news on the whole, but Daily Yonder reporters Bill Bishop and Robert Gallardo went a little farther in their analysis of the data provided them by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. They found that rural women hardly keep up and some have even lost ground in the last decade while their urban sisters are obviously gaining from widespread health advances.

Bishop and Gallardo report "that the solid gain in longevity was matched in only 168 rural or exurban counties, or 6.5 percent of all the counties outside the cities." That is, while women in most of the nation were living longer lives, in many rural counties -- some 622 of them, in fact -- their longevity shortened in the same decade. The 622 represent some 24 percent of rural counties and exurban counties (counties in a metro area where more than half the county population lives in rural census tracts), women lived shorter lives in 2009 than in 1999. (You can see a similar map and charts for rural men here.)

 As the Daily Yonder reporters point out, "in more than 95 percent of rural and exurban counties, changes in female longevity in the last 10 years failed to match the gains experienced in the rest of the country." The largest decreases in female life expectancy between 1999 and 2009 were clustered in Oklahoma, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama and Georgia. (Read more)

Report: Women in four of five rural counties live shorter lives

Rural women live shorter lives than urban women, according to a data analysis by the Daily Yonder and the Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs. In four out of five rural and exurban counties, women have shorter lives, report the Yonder's Bill Bishop and CRA's Roberto Gallardo. (Yonder map; click on it for larger version)

The average age of death for women was 81.3 years in 2009, the most recent year with available data. Out of 2,500 rural and exurban counties, women in only 540 of those reached the national average age of death, Bishop and Gallardo report. Women in the upper Midwest live "considerably longer lives" than those in the Southeast. The pair report that this pattern is similar for rural men. (Read more)