STAT+: Rural health study is told it’s losing federal funds, and other major heart studies are worried
A federal health study that was examining the high burden of chronic disease in rural areas learned its funding has been cut off.
Vasan Ramachandran is baffled. A cardiologist and veteran of the famed Framingham Heart Study, he is struggling to understand why a similar study he brought to life in 10 rural counties across four Southern states is facing elimination. The RURAL Cohort Study, set in motion six years ago, was working toward its recruitment goal of 4,600 people, a sign that it was winning the trust of people in remote areas of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky.
Participants don’t walk into a brick-and-mortar building for this study. The research team travels to them, working in a mobile examination unit housed in a 50-foot trailer weighing about 50,000 metric tons and carrying a CT scanner plus a cardiac ultrasound machine that uses AI. “We take the science to the people,” he said.
The RURAL (Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal) Cohort Study follows a trail blazed by the Framingham Heart Study, intended at its outset to study the origins and causes of coronary heart disease. Its findings defined how cholesterol causes heart disease; how high blood pressure drives heart disease, heart failure, and stroke; and how diabetes, diet, and smoking contribute to heart disease. Newer studies have widened the lens to focus on different populations in different parts of the country than the largely white, middle-class people living in Massachusetts when the Framingham study launched in 1948.
