jueves, 23 de mayo de 2019

Q&A: What’s driving health issues in rural America?

Morning Rounds
Shraddha Chakradhar

Q&A: What’s driving health issues in rural America?

newly launched study called RURAL, from researchers behind the long-running Framingham Heart Study, will follow 4,000 participants over the next six years in 10 low-income counties in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to better understand the factors driving conditions like diabetes and obesity that disproportionately affect people in the South. I spoke with Boston University’s Vasan Ramachandran, principal investigator of RURAL, to learn more.

What was the motivation for this study? 
It was a good scientific starting point to have a study that goes after the high-risk counties [in the South] but also pair them with low-risk counties. We can examine the differences and begin to understand what drives the high risk of heart, lung, and stroke death rates in the rural parts of the South.

What do you hope will happen at the end of it? 
We do hope and expect to give back aggregate data of all these communities back to the local authorities and departments of rural health so that they can use those data to design future implementation science. 

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