CDC director visits Appalachian Kentucky to understand region's ills and how to treat them

Looking to find answers for the growing rate of chronic diseases—such as obesity—that are crippling the U.S., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden went right to the heart of one of the nation's unhealthiest regions—Appalachian Kentucky. This week Frieden was in the Bluegrass State "to find out more about the underlying causes of the region's ills and how to treat them—and in the process gain traction against the rising burden of chronic disease that ails the nation," Laura Ungar reports for USA Today.

"Cancer, for example, touches nearly every American family. But in Kentucky, it strikes and kills at the nation's highest rate and is often diagnosed late," Ungar writes. "Other chronic diseases are just as prevalent here. Heart disease prevalence is 84 percent higher than the national average, diabetes is 47 percent higher and lung cancer kills at a rate 83 percent higher—and some of these numbers continue to rise." Fran Feltner, director of the University of Kentucky Center of Excellence in Rural Health, told Ungar, "We're in the stroke belt, the diabetes belt, the coronary valley. We get all those labels. We're in a sad state here."

Kentucky also leads the nation in smoking, Ungar writes. "Nearly a third of adults here smoke cigarettes, and those numbers have remained mostly level even as they've dropped nationally. And in a place where people used to grow, harvest and can their own food, many people now live far from well-stocked grocery stores and turn to convenience items, fast food and Mountain Dew."

Frieden and Benjamin Sommers, assistant professor of health policy and economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, "say improving the health of Appalachia and similarly unhealthy regions and populations will not be easy because it depends on changing seemingly intractable socioeconomic disparities and personal health habits," Ungar writes. "Obesity, meanwhile, is stubbornly rising nationally, spawning diabetes, heart disease and many cancers and spanning all socioeconomic levels. Frieden told a group in Hazard, Ky., that two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and 'we didn't have an outbreak of poor self-control. It's our environment.'" (Read more)