Diabetes Health Talk

Courtesy Mike DeDoncker of Gatehouse News Services: Rural residents are more likely to suffer from diabetes than their city-dwelling counterparts, according to a first-of-its-kind study by researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford.

The information was included in a report looking into disparities in diabetes care, one of five presentations by college of medicine personnel at last month’s North American Primary Care Research Group annual meeting in Puerto Rico.

The study used a sample of 37,133 adult diabetes patients identified in Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Surveys compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and all 50 states.

Aguero said the study showed that 9.7 percent of the adults living in rural areas, identified as being outside metropolitan or suburban areas, had diabetes and 8.2 percent in the metropolitan and suburban areas had diabetes “meaning, if you were living in a rural area, you were 16 percent more likely to have diabetes.”

He said researchers thought the opposite might have been true based on the idea that “you would think that, living in a rural area, maybe you were eating better, healthier foods and maybe being more physically active as opposed to people living in the city who you might think would be getting more fatty foods, being very sedentary and using their car to go to everywhere.”

Aguero also said that, based on the five standards of appropriate care established by the American Diabetes Association, rural residents were also 20.5 percent more likely than urban dwellers not to be receiving such care.