Throughout much of our nation’s history, people who lived in the countryside were healthier than those in urban areas.
“Sometimes something changed in the 1980s. What started happening was that life expectancy started to decline in rural areas,” says Dr. Vasan Ramachandran, who wants to know why. He is the founding dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
He runs what is called the Rural Cohort Study, where they take the lab directly to the often isolated communities they want to do research.
“We designed a 52-foot trailer that has the fastest CT scanner in the country,” he said. “It has a cardiac ultrasound machine that uses artificial intelligence, it has a mobile laboratory that uses artificial intelligence, and then we park it at the door of the community.”
Courtesy: University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
They meet the people who live there and learn about the medical and non-medical challenges that may be affecting their health.
“We took rural counties that are relatively healthy and rural counties where death rates are very high, and we looked at both groups of participants to inform ourselves,” he said. “Why do some people do better in some rural areas and not others?”
They plan to use what they learn, now and in the years to come, to improve the health and well-being of those they are studying.
Science and Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discoveries in San Antonio advance the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
