BACKGROUND Health care is generally considered to be more highly valued in urban areas than in rural areas. However, studies have reported that there is no difference in the health care values of urban and rural areas in the Kingdom of Thailand, with some studies even indicating that these values are stronger in rural areas. We, therefore, conducted interviews and implemented a qualitative inve...

BACKGROUND Rural and urban populations have disparate socio-demographic and economic characteristics, which have an influence on equity and their health seeking behavior. We examined and compared the health care seeking behavior for perceived morbidity between urban and rural households in Southwest Ethiopia. METHODS Analytic cross-sectional study was conducted among urban and rural household...

For some time, individuals in multiple contexts have been moving from rural to urban areas for economic reasons. In recent years, however, young people in Japan have been increasingly turning to rural areas to embrace a slower, lesshectic lifestyle. Despite this interesting development, researchers have thus far failed to identify determinants of residents’ well-being in rural and urban areas i...

BACKGROUND Diabetes is a major global public health problem driven by a high prevalence of metabolic risk factors. OBJECTIVE To describe the differences of metabolic risk factors of type 2 diabetes, as well as glycemic control and complicated diabetic complications between rural and urban Uygur residents in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. METHODS This comparative cross-sectional ...

INTRODUCTION Evidence has accumulated that exposure to ambient air pollution during pregnancy may influence preterm birth (PTB) in urban settings. Conversely, this relation has barely been investigated in rural areas where individual characteristics (demographic, socioeconomic, and psychosocial factors) and environmental co-exposures may differ. OBJECTIVE We examined the association between p...

INTRODUCTION The disparity in under-five year-old mortality rates between rural and urban areas in Kenya (also reported in other in sub-Saharan African countries), is a critical national concern. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of geographical location and maternal factors on the likelihood of mortality among under-five children in rural and urban areas in Kenya. ...

BACKGROUND Although outcomes among people with schizophrenia differ by social context, this has rarely been examined across rural v. urban settings. For individuals with schizophrenia, employment is widely recognised as a critical ingredient of social integration. AIMS To compare employment for people with schizophrenia in rural v. urban settings in China. METHOD In a large community-based ...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to explore inequities in knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding tuberculosis (TB) among the urban and rural populations. DESIGN A cross-sectional study was conducted in two districts of Pakistan's Punjab province. The 1080 subjects aged 20 years and above, including 432 urban and 648 rural respondents, were randomly selected using multistage cluster s...

In a house-to-house study of 994 urban Zulus the prevalence of hypertension according to WHO criteria was 25% (23% men, 27% women). In a rural Zulu study of 987 the prevalence age corrected to the urban distribution was 9.4% (8.7% men, 10% women). Thus there was a pronounced difference between the prevalence of hypertension in the urban and rural Zulu (p less than 0.0005). There was an earlier ...

OBJECTIVE Reviews of urban-rural differences in psychiatric disorders conclude that urban rates may be marginally higher and, specifically, somewhat higher for depression. However, pooled results are not available. METHOD A meta-analysis of urban-rural differences in prevalence was conducted on data taken from 20 population survey studies published since 1985. Pooled urban-rural odds ratios (...