PROBLEM Chronic diseases and conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes) are the leading causes of death in the United States. Controlling health risk behaviors and conditions (e.g., smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet, excessive drinking, and obesity) and using preventive health-care services (e.g., physical examination, vaccination, screening for high blood pressure and...

PROBLEM Chronic diseases (e.g., heart diseases, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, and arthritis) and unintentional injuries are the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States. Behavioral risk factors (e.g., tobacco use, poor diet, physical inactivity, excessive alcohol consumption, failure to use seat belts, and insufficient sleep) are linked to th...

BACKGROUND: Limited information is available about teenage pregnancy and childbearing in rural areas, even though approximately 20 percent of the nation's youth live in rural areas. Identifying whether there are differences in the teenage birth rate (TBR) across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas is important, because these differences may reflect modifiable ecological-level influences such...

INTRODUCTION It is necessary for planning in order to achieve optimal development, to have knowledge and understanding of the current situation. This identification requires separate areas of study into planning and assessing regions of each area with development indicators and analysis and ranking each area in terms of having gifts of development. The study also aims to analyze the development...

Parkinson disease associated with farming and exposure to agricultural chemicals has been reported in numerous studies; little is known about Parkinson disease risk factors for those living in urban areas. The authors investigated the relation between copper, lead, or manganese emissions and Parkinson disease incidence in the urban United States, studying 29 million Medicare beneficiaries in th...

INTRODUCTION Racial/ethnic disparities have been studied extensively. However, the combined influence of geographic location and economic status on specific health outcomes is less well studied. This study's objective was to examine 1) the disparity in chronic disease prevalence in the United States by county economic status and metropolitan classification and 2) the social gradient by economic...

INTRODUCTION Several well-established determinants of health are associated with premature mortality. Using data from the 2010 County Health Rankings, we describe the association of selected determinants of health with premature mortality among counties with broadly differing levels of income. METHODS County-level data on 3,139 US counties from the 2010 County Health Rankings were linked to c...

INTRODUCTION Conflicting data exists regarding the influence of population density on colorectal cancer (CRC) outcomes; to better understand this, the present study evaluated outcomes along an urban-rural continuum. METHODS Colorectal patients aged ≥40 years from 1992 to 2002 were identified in the SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) Registries of the National Cancer Inst...

Executive Summary This applied research effort intends to provide a rigorous empirical foundation upon which to base groupings, or clusters, of Wisconsin counties for analytical comparisons. We ask a simple question in this paper: which regions (counties) in Wisconsin are homogeneous (hence comparable) given a set of economic and demographic variables? Using the statistical techniques of princi...

In this paper, we examine geographic and racial/ethnic differences in heart disease and stroke mortality in the Appalachian region. Initial comparisons are made between national rates for heart disease and stroke mortality and those for the Appalachian region. County-level analyses were performed to examine the relative mortality experience of populations in Appalachian counties compared to oth...