The life expectancy gab between rural and urban residents has increased by 1.6 years in the last few decades, according to a new study
Healthy People 2020, the national health initiative of the United States has taken significant measures to reduce health inequalities and increase life expectancy throughout the country. However, the findings of a recent study revealed that rural residents of the country may not have benefited just as much from these initiatives as the life expectancy gab between rural and urban residents continues to grow.
According to the findings of the study, the rural-urban life expectancy gap widened from 0.4 years in 1969 to 1971 to 2.0 years from 2005 to 2009.
"We've had information about life expectancy by gender, racial or ethnic and socioeconomic groups, but to our knowledge, nobody has looked at how disparities in life expectancy have changed over time-whether they're widening or narrowing," said the study's lead author Gopal K. Singh, Ph.D, of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in a press statement. "In fact, disparities have been increasing over the past two decades as opposed to the last four."
Researchers noted that cardiovascular disease, accidents, COPD and lung cancer made up for 70 percent of the overall rural-urban gap in life expectancy. These factors were also responsible for 54 percent of the life expectancy gap between the urban rich and rural poor in 2005 to 2009.
Singh noted that rural areas have a higher rate of poverty, obesity, smoking and lung cancer. In addition, most rural residents belong to lower income families and very few of them have college degrees. Added to this is that fact that they have restricted access to proper health care facilities.
Another reason for this growing life expectancy gap could be the tendency of health officials to take public health resources away from rural areas and focus on urban areas because 83 percent of the U.S. population lives in urban regions.
The good news, however, is that there has been a consistent overall increases in U.S. life expectancy during the past 40 years, from 70.8 years in 1970 to 78.7 years in 2010.
"In public health, we tend to focus on overall life expectancy and it does move forward a little bit each year," said Steven P. Wallace, Ph.D., associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and chair and professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the university's Fielding School of Public Health. "We have spent a lot of time looking at health disparities over the last 20 years and yet rural and urban disparities haven't been front and center."
Last March, a study conducted by University of Pennsylvania researchers found that life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than any other developed country in the world. This was mainly because of the higher mortality rates among Americans younger than 50.
Findings of the study were published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
