Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Women see rise in diseases, study says
Women in Pulaski County and Radford were found to face deep dips in life expectancy.
There's bad news for women in nearly 1,000 counties across the United States and particularly bad news for women in Radford and Pulaski County.
A study published Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, an online journal of the Public Library of Science, found that women in those counties can expect an earlier death than was projected in the early 1980s, possibly because of chronic diseases related to smoking, obesity and high blood pressure.
The most dramatic dip in life expectancy rates for women occurred in Radford and Pulaski County, which were merged into one region for the study, where the rate has decreased by more than five years since 1983.
"They were among the worst ones in this case," said Dr. Majid Ezzati of Harvard's School of Public Health.
The study does not pinpoint why those two localities were among the worst.
"We didn't look at one county as a whole," Ezzati added. "We looked at life expectancy for the past four decades in a reasonably large number of counties."
The study looked at 3,141 U.S. counties that were grouped into 2,068 units. Of those, the 1,000 counties represented about 12 percent of the nation's adult female population.
Ezzati said he and three of his colleagues from Harvard's Initiative for Global Health, the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation spent two years on the study. The scientists used mortality statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, choosing to study counties because they represent the smallest unit for which mortality rates are routinely available.
Their conclusions -- detailed in a paper titled "The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in County Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States" -- showed that "the rise in chronic disease mortality for relatively large segments of the American population, especially women, defies recent trends in other high-income countries."
Deep Southern states, the Appalachian region, the lower Midwest and one county in Maine revealed a trend toward lower life expectancy for women. Rural counties and counties with low-income populations were pinpointed.
"It seems to be a story around chronic diseases that are preventable," Ezzati said, noting that he and his colleagues hypothesize that smoking and being overweight account for the increases in the diseases and, thus, the decreases in life expectancy.
Despite national efforts to educate the public about better health practices, the statistics show disparities in certain areas of the country.
Bobby Parker, spokesman for the New River Health District, said his office was trying to understand the significance of the report Tuesday.
"I don't know specifically what might account for that report. We don't have any hard data yet to respond," he said.
"We know in general that there are health care challenges in rural areas," Parker added, citing both Radford and Pulaski County as fitting into Southwest Virginia's rural description.
Parker, who was in Richmond on Tuesday attending workshops, said health department representatives there were already looking at statistics. "Right now, we're fact-finding," he said.
Tuesday's study noted that life expectancy increased in the 1960s and 1970s for women and in the 1970s for men, a supposed result of declining death rates from heart attacks with improvements in medicine. During the 1980s, the life expectancy rate leveled off. It was during the period of 1983 to 1999, the study says, that women's life expectancy fell in the nearly 1,000 counties.
Some speculate that because women started smoking in large numbers long after men took up the habit, the effects are now starting to show with women having lung cancer, emphysema and other smoking-related illnesses.
Parker said the answers to why Radford and Pulaski County were cited as places where women's life expectancy dropped significantly are "all could-be types of answers."
"I'm sure it's a combination of things, but we just don't have enough data yet," he said.
Ezzati did note that while life expectancy for women is showing a downward trend, it is still higher than that for men. He said the 1999 statistic for the United States as a whole gives an average life expectancy of 79.6 years for women and 74.1 years for men.
