The 2019 age-adjusted natural-cause mortality (NCM) rate for the prime working-age population (aged 25–54) was 43 percent higher in rural (nonmetropolitan) areas than in urban (metropolitan) areas. This is a shift from 25 years ago when NCM rates in urban and rural areas were similar for this age group. As a first step to understanding the increasing gap between rural and urban NCM rates, this report examines natural (disease-related) deaths for prime working-age adults in rural and urban areas between 1999 and 2019 using data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiology Research (WONDER). Prime working age NCM rates are examined for the population as a whole, as well as by sex, race and ethnicity, region, and State. Overall, both an increase in the rural, prime working-age NCM rates and a decrease in the corresponding urban rates are contributing to the growing mortality gap.
Record Identifier
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/341639
Language
English
Total Pages
37
Note
This report used publicly available data based on death certificates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database. We queried age adjusted WONDER mortality data by year of death, sex, race, ethnicity, residence, and cause of death. Deaths are coded using the International Classification of Disease 10th Revision (ICD-10) codes. These codes were adopted in 1999 to classify causes of death and are only broadly comparable to years prior to 1999. Our analysis is primarily descriptive and focuses on a growing gap in mortality rates between rural (nonmetropolitan) and urban (metropolitan) counties. The authors compared rural and urban changes in CDC NCM data for prime working-age populations aggregated to increase the number of observations and decrease the unreliability of the statistics in two 3-year periods (1999–2001 and 2017–2019) by sex, race, ethnicity, regions, and States.
Series Statement
Economic Information Bulletin No. 265
