Cancer death rates continue to fall nationwide but rise in areas of the country that are relatively poor, a new study has found.
Cancer death rates in poor areas rose by 50 percent while richer parts of the country saw death rates fall by nearly 20 percent between 1980 and 2014, researchers report in a study published in the January 2017 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association.
"We are going in the wrong direction," Ali Mokdad, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told the AP, per NBC News. "We should be going forward, not backward."
"It makes you wonder: How could this happen in a country like ours, when we spend more money on health than any other country in the world?"
Researchers used information from the National Center for Health Statistics and found increases in cancer mortality in 160 counties, with the highest rates of increase observed in Kentucky and scattered across regions of the South.
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