Heart disease deaths soar in rural America, driven by rise in working-age adults
Heart disease death rates in rural America are rising among younger people, increasing the rural-urban divide, according to research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
When Ephraim Trembly found his brother in rural Maryland, John had already been dead for three days.
According to their father, John Trembly Sr., how he died remained unclear, since John’s body was so decomposed that they could only identify him from a tattoo. The coroner found traces of fentanyl, so it stood to reason that John had overdosed, his father said. But the autopsy also showed something else, something more unusual: At 20 years old, John’s cardiovascular system had been destroyed.
Before his death last year, John had spent most of his life in Terra Alta, West Virginia, a town of fewer than 1,500 people.
A fifth of Americans reside in rural areas, and on average they live three years less than their urban counterparts, largely due to heart disease and strokes. And this disparity widened between 2010 and 2022, driven by a 21% increase in cardiovascular deaths among working-age rural adults, according to research published last month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
This is the first national analysis of rural cardiovascular health during Covid-19, said Dr. Rishi Wadhera, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the senior author of this study. While heart disease and stroke deaths had been decreasing in both rural and urban communities before 2019, they shot up with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, reversing decades of progress.
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