Abstract P356: Does Out-Migration Contribute to Poorer Health in Rural Communities? An Investigation Using Mortality in the US

People living in poor rural communities, particularly in the South, live shorter and less healthy lives than those residing elsewhere in the United States. The basis of this very high rural burden of heart, lung, and blood disease, which does not spare any race, is unclear. We hypothesized that a potential contribution to this phenomenon is differential selection of healthy individuals to migrate out of rural communities. We examined how county-level migration patterns relate to county-level mortality with a specific focus on rural counties. We compiled nationally representative county-level data migration data from Internal Revenue Services for years 2011-2019 and mortality data from National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for years 2018-2019. We standardized characteristics to a mean=0 and standard deviation=1 and modeled county-level age-adjusted death rate in 2019 using 2-level hierarchical linear regression. Out- and in-migration in 2019 was not significantly associated with age-adjusted death rate in 2019 after adjustment for social, economic and population factors at the county-level. However, when stratified by 6 categories of urban/rural, greater out-migration in the smallest rural counties (non-core) was associated with higher age-adjusted death rate after adjustment for other county factors [Beta (95% CI); 7.2 (0.11,14.28)] (Table 1). When including lagged out-migration rates for years prior to 2019, previous out-migration was associated with age-adjusted death rate in the second smallest rural county categorization (micropolitan). These findings help to ascertain another component potentially contributing to differentially poorer health in rural communities. Future work at the conference will further evaluate decade trends in migration across the US by county.