STARKVILLE — After almost eight months of being parked in front of OCH Regional Medical Center, the Risks Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal (RURAL) Study mobile exam unit has rolled out of Oktibbeha County.
Principal investigator Dr. Ervin Fox said the trailer left on Aug. 9, headed to Panola County to continue the next leg of exams in the state. But the work of the RURAL Study remains.
“The mobile exam unit, even though it’s moving on to Panola County, there is still going to be continued activity in Oktibbeha county in terms of ancillary studies,” Fox said. “They have a sleep study and a stress study, and those types of studies are going to continue to go on within the county for the people who have done the exam and are considered participants of the RURAL Study.”
The RURAL study is a five-year national study that began in 2019 and is funded by the National Institutes of Health, spanning across 10 counties. It aims to better understand why people living in rural areas suffer from heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders more than those living in urban areas.
“This study was meant to better understand why those people who live in rural areas die from heart attack and stroke way out of proportion to those who are in urban areas,” principal investigator Dr. Ervin Fox said. “We started seeing a trend in the ‘80s with those in rural areas dying out of proportion from those in urban areas and that trend has started to grow since the ‘80s.”
Starting in mid-December 2022, the mobile exam unit trailer, filled with medical equipment to perform CT scans, electrocardiograms and other lab work, parked in front of the hospital to perform comprehensive clinical assessments for county residents.
Fox said the study was aiming to include 718 participants in Oktibbeha County, but it ended up recruiting 758, making the county’s leg of the study particularly successful.
“It went extraordinarily well, in terms of recruitment, participants and participants coming through the mobile exam unit,” Fox said. “… They really did extraordinarily well in a short period of time.”
Jackie Ellis, community advisory board member in Oktibbeha County, said she helped recruit some of these participants from churches and other organizations in Starkville, Sturgis, Maben and other parts of the county.
“We went to various organizations in the community and just pretty much explained everything, and how to get it and the benefits of it,” Ellis said. “We plan to continue to engage them and keep them updated as the results come out.”
Fox said the results of the mobile exam unit’s findings are being processed and should be available for Oktibbeha County “relatively soon,” most likely in the next two or three months. After that, it will be disseminated to stakeholders like the Mississippi Department of Health, county healthcare providers and county supervisors.
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