Do you want to live longer? Live near a primary care physician.
Analyzing US population data, every 10 additional primary care physicians per 100,000 people was associated with a 51.5-day increase in life expectancy, researchers at Stanford University found in a study published Monday in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA. However, from 2005 to 2015, the density of primary care physicians actually fell to 41.4 per 100,000 people from 46.6.
Data from 3,142 US counties, 7,144 primary care service areas and 306 hospital referral regions were used to investigate the association of primary care physician supply with changes in life expectancy and mortality after adjusting for health care, demographic, socioeconomic and other lifestyle factors. The analysis was carried out from March 2018 to July 2018.
Primary care physicians increased from 196,014 in 2005 to 204,419 in 2015. But losses in some counties and increases in population size led to a fall in the mean density of primary care physicians relative to population size.
Ten additional primary care physicians per 100,000 people was associated with reduced cardiovascular, cancer and respiratory mortality by 0.9 percent to 1.4 percent.
“Many believe that a well-functioning health care system requires a solid foundation of primary care. However, persistent payment disparities between primary care and procedural specialties continue to erode the US primary care physician workforce,” the study found. The paper’s lead author was Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University.
Urgent care vs. emergency rooms
For those who need to see a doctor immediately without an appointment, recent research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Emergency Medicine, found that patients rated urgent care facilities more favorably in online reviews than emergency rooms.
Roughly 47 percent of emergency departments received one-star reviews versus 30 percent of urgent care centers.
The researchers analyzed more than 100,000 Yelp reviews that were posted between 2005 and 2017 when urgent care facilities were on the rise. The reviews covered 1,566 emergency departments and 5,601 urgent care centers.
During that time, an average of one new review for an emergency department or urgent care center appeared every hour, every day.
The results of that study “provides a unique opportunity for researchers and clinicians to learn from online reviews, which provide a raw narrative from consumers,” the authors wrote.
Researchers identified key themes in the five-star reviews of emergency departments, including bedside manner, treatment of family members and access to care on nights and weekends.
However, emergency departments received negative remarks for their speed of care, while urgent care centers received one-star reviews for their poor reception experiences.
Lifestyle can help you live 10 years longer
People who had a healthy lifestyle were 82 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65 percent less likely to die from cancer when compared to people who lived unhealthy lifestyles over a three-decade span, according to a separate study published last year in the journal Circulation.
They had a healthy diet, healthy weight, exercised 30 minutes or more a day, didn’t drink too much alcohol or smoke.
The researchers analyzed 34 years of data from over 78,000 women and 27 years of data from more than 44,000 men. They estimated the women who adopted these five habits would see 14 more years of life and men would add 12 years.
Obesity, in particular, puts people at risk of a whole host of problems. Being either overweight or obese is associated with a higher risk of dying prematurely than being a healthier weight, according to a study released in 2016 by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Cambridge in the UK.
The average body mass index for an American man is 28.6, up from 25.1 in the early 1960s; anything over 30 is regarded as obese.
People who are considered obese with a BMI over 30 and still have good metabolic health — and didn’t have ailments such as diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure or a history of strokes — are still at a higher risk of having such problems than people who were not obese.
President Trump has a BMI of 30.4, according to his latest physical.