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Rural Americans Die Younger from Preventable Causes, CDC Study Finds 

Rural Americans face greater preventable early death risks than urban dwellers, underscoring urgent need for improved healthcare access.

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United States: According to new federal data, rural Americans have a higher tendency to die early due to one out of the five leading causes of death, as compared to those living in urban areas. 

In the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report published on Tuesday, researchers went through various potent preventable deaths from 2010 to 2022, as ABC News reported. 

What more has the research found? 

According to the researchers, the major causes for rural Americans to die earlier are heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory disease before reaching the age of 80 with respect to their urban counterparts. 

Dr. Macarena Garcia, a senior health scientist in the CDC’s Office of Rural Health, observed that in the United States there is a well-known rural-urban gap, where residents from rural areas are more likely to be ill and have less income and miserable health indicators as compared to their counterparts from the urban areas, according to a defined press conference on May 18th. 

Furthermore, keeping in mind the US Census Bureau statistics, 20 percent of the population in the country is living in rural areas, and the rest are in urban areas. 

Rural Americans Die Younger from Preventable Causes, CDC Study Finds. Credit | Getty Images
Rural Americans Die Younger from Preventable Causes, CDC Study Finds. Credit | Getty Images

What have the previous research indicated? 

Prior studies have shown that rural Americans face as many health problems as a lack of access to adequate emergency and special care services and are more likely to be uninsured. Besides that, the rural residents suffer from high blood pressure and obesity more than the city citizens, as ABC News reported. 

The researchers pinpointed the early demise as an incident that occurred before attaining 80 years. The life span that was estimated in the USA in 2010 was 79 years old. 

The figure for prevented deaths from certain early causes was obtained by subtracting the number of expected deaths from the number of actual ones. 

According to the CDC reports, COVID-19 has been the third or fourth leading reason of death since 2020, where deaths from the virus were “excluded to maintain consistency and facilitate the assessment of trends over time.” 

Know more about the findings of the study 

By the end of 2020, 6.37 million Americans can be found within the population of individuals who died early as a consequence of the five leading risk factors that were studied during the 12-year time frame. 

Researchers discovered that about 6 out of 10 victims of such accidents as traffic accidents, falls, illegal shots, poisonings, overdose deaths, and drowning could be saved. 

Moreover, as per the report, 34 percent of strokes and heart disease deaths, as well as 26 percent of deaths caused by chronic lower respiratory were thought to be probably preventable. 

The findings were that rural counties’ rate of preventable deaths was equal to that of urban counties. 

For instance, as evident in the rural areas below the age of 80, 44 percent of the heart disease deaths that are potentially preventable were detected, and 33 percent in urban areas. Deaths due to unintentional injury and chronic lower respiratory disease are the causes of the early deaths of more than half in both rural and urban areas, and a good part of them are preventable, as ABC News reported. 

Among cancer deaths, the percentage of prevention is less than 20 percent in rural counties. 

Garcia said, “We have to remember that screening prevention services as well as treatment services are much more accessible in urban areas,” and, “So that means they are limited in rural areas. Sometimes people have to drive two or three hours to the nearest center that provides specialty care.” 

She added, “So that means people go without preventive services. People in rural areas likely have lower rates of screening and certainly have less access to treatment.” 

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Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! 

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Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! Credit | Adobe Stock

United States: As experts note, if one skips a workout or stays up late, his/her brain might still be paying for it even two weeks from now. 

The team of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Oulu in Finland have presented how our lifelong daily behaviors influence brain connectivity and how they remain remodeled throughout our lifespan, thus providing valuable grounds for understanding neural plasticity. 

More about the finding 

Researchers are now very specific that the ways our brains communicate also change, rather than staying the same over a long time, in response to recent experiences over a long extended time period. 

Moreover, they also rejected several principles of brain function stability and opened the consciousness of the influence of human daily habits on the neural network, studyfinds.org reported. 

The particular experimental design of this study was examined in one subject over the span of five months and reported in PLOS Biology. 

Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! Credit | Adobe Stock

Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! Credit | Adobe Stock

By acquiring a brain image every few days and integrating it with data donated by wearables and smartphones, the researchers were able to assess how such pre-mentioned variables as sleep quality, physical activity, mood, and even heart rate variability affect the connectivity of the brain. 

Further details of the analysis 

The participant, Ana Triana, was also the main researcher in the study and received thirty scans over fifteen weeks. 

Each scan involved four different tasks: simple attention task, working memory task, resting state, and then execution of watching the movie.  

This variation helped the researchers to trace how various types of brain activities changed along with everyday perceptions. 

At the same time, monitoring devices of her sleep/wake cycle, physical movements, and data about her heart and breathing rates were collected. 

The mobile application is used to capture the moods and events of each day. This integration of brain scans and actigraphy gave us an extremely high-resolution picture of how daily experience and brain activity were related, studyfinds.org reported. 

The study revealed two distinct patterns of brain response: A brief wave, which lasts for a period of up to seven days, and a long-term wave, which can go up to fifteen days. 

Results of the study

One of the interesting outcomes was a strong connection between heart rate variability – which is a measure of the heart’s adaptability – and brain connectivity while resting. 

It shows that activities that affect our body’s relaxation response, like stress management ways, can shape our brain wiring even when we’re not actively concentrating on a task. 

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US Obesity Crisis: 40% of Americans Now Obese – What’s Going On? 

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US Obesity Crisis: 40% of Americans Now Obese - What's Going On? Credit | USA TODAY

United States: Obesity remains a huge problem for Americans as far as their health is concerned. New data received by the governments indicate severe obesity, a condition that involves storing far too much fat in the body, has risen to a great extent in the last decade. 

More about the study 

About 40 percent of the population in the US is obese, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people. 

Overall, 9 percent of those polled said they were suffering from severe obesity, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Moreover, women were nearly two times as likely as men to report severe obesity. 

The general obesity rate looked to have decreased in comparison to what was observed in the 2017-2020 survey. However, it was not considered as a statistically significant change. 

US Obesity Crisis: 40% of Americans Now Obese - What's Going On? Credit | USA TODAY

US Obesity Crisis: 40% of Americans Now Obese – What’s Going On? Credit | USA TODAY

That is, the numbers are small enough that there exists a probability that the rates did not fall at all. 

What more are the experts stating? 

Dr. Samuel Emmerich conducted the latest study for CDC as a public health officer. He said it is still early to determine its impact on the disease, including new obesity treatments, which include weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound. 

What they found is that the combined obesity estimate of the United States in the last decade has not considerably altered.  

According to Emmerich, “We simply can’t see down to that detailed level to prescription medication use and compare that to changes in obesity prevalence.”  

The prevalence of severe obesity increased from nearly eight percent in the study between 2013 and 2014 to nearly 10 percent in the most recent study. 

Prior to that, obesity rates had risen rapidly in the US since the 1990s, according to US federal research. 

Obesity and severe obesity are expressed in terms of BMI, which is calculated with the help of height and weight. The above BMI indicates that a person is obese, as per the Food and Drugs Administration. 

Super obesity is defined as the condition when the person’s BMI is 40 or more. 

Solveig Cunningham is a professor of global health at Emory University who is interested in obesity. 

“Seeing increases in severe obesity is even more alarming because that’s the level of obesity that’s most highly associated with some of the highest levels of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and lower quality of life,” Cunningham added. 

Cunningham also added that it is not apparent why severe obesity rates were higher among women. 

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Is Fluoride in Water Really Safe? Study Raises Serious Health Concerns

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United States: Recent reports about potential health risks and whether fluoride benefits are as big as once believed have prompted scrutiny of a public health practice – adding fluoride to water supplies. 

This is because, as with some questions, the safety of the practice and new data raise questions about the value of fluoride. 

More about the news 

Adding fluoride to tap water produces only a slight benefit in reducing tooth decay in children’s baby teeth, a new report from the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent group reviewing scientific research, finds. 

It is found that adding fluoride to tap water is a slight benefit, leading to slightly fewer cavities in children’s baby teeth, CNN Health reported. 

More about the finding 

Research done before 1975 had large benefits; children living in areas with fluoride added to their water averaged about one fewer primary teeth affected by decay than those of children living in areas without water fluoridation. 

Those findings don’t apply to more current populations with increased access to other sources of fluoride and lower levels of dental disease at baseline. 

Since the 1970s, fluoride-containing toothpaste has been widely available and is more often used. 

According to the new report published this week, fluoride in water was tied to a difference in decay of only about a quarter of a tooth, on average, in more recent studies. 

The federal judge, last month had asked the US Environmental Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water in response to concerns that fluoride may affect young children’s intellectual development, CNN Health reported. 

In light of concerns about fluoride’s possible effect on young children’s intellectual development, a federal judge last month ordered that the EPA further regulate fluoride in drinking water. 

Some foods and groundwater have fluoride, a mineral. It can help protect tooth enamel, which can erode with acids produced by plaque, bacteria, sugar, and other acids found in your mouth. 

The USA began adding fluoride to public water systems in 1945. 

Now, almost three-quarters of the US population, about two hundred and nine million people, are served by drinking water systems that have been fluoridated, according to data from the CDC. 

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