Mainers are known to have higher rates of cancer than other Americans. But your odds of having the disease and surviving it vary depending on where in Maine you live, according to a new statewide report.

Cancer patients in Aroostook County are more likely to die from the disease than patients in Cumberland County, for example.

Rural Maine counties such as Aroostook also have higher rates of heart attacks, diabetes and asthma, the report says.

Cumberland County, on the other hand, leads the state in chronic alcohol abuse.

Those and other county-by-county variations are revealed in Maine’s first statewide Community Health Needs Assessment, a 262-page report released last week by the state’s three largest health care organizations. Based on hospital data and a fall survey of more than 6,400 households, the report is a detailed checkup on Maine’s top public health issues, including chronic diseases, cancer rates, levels of obesity, smoking and substance abuse and access to dental health and mental health services.

Health experts say the study answers questions such as where to focus resources on anti-drug programs for youth. But, they say, it also raises many other questions, such as why is cancer more prevelant in northern and eastern Maine.

“Having these numbers in front of people and communities can really help galvanize opinion and action,” said Deborah Deatrick, vice president of community health for MaineHealth, which operates Maine Medical Center and other hospitals in southern and coastal Maine.

Three years ago, MaineHealth joined forces with the state’s other large hospital systems — Eastern Maine Health Care Systems and MaineGeneral Health — to address statewide health issues. The collaborative is called OneMaine Health and its first order of business was the new health needs report.

“I’ve been working in public health in Maine for 25-plus years and it has always frustrated me, and I’m not alone, that we have never had a really comprehensive health data report that gets repeated on a regular basis,” Deatrick said.

The private health care organizations spent more than $400,000 to complete the study and plan to present the findings to the health care industry, the public, business leaders and state officials. They hope to repeat it every five years to track the progress of prevention efforts and identify new areas of concern.

The study also included an unusual collaboration between the University of New England, which was contracted to lead the research, and the University of Southern Maine, which helped complete the report.

While other studies periodically examine Maine’s public health needs, “it’s unusual to do something statewide. It’s a pretty ambitious undertaking,” said John Gale, a researcher at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service who contributed to the report.

Gale said the county-by-county details add depth to other studies and will lead to more localized research.

“We weren’t too surprised by much of what we found. But what is useful is looking at those patterns across counties,” Gale said.

The findings clearly show that risk factors such as obesity and smoking are more prevalent in communities with lower income and education levels. And, where there is more obesity and smoking, especially in an aging population, there also is more diabetes and heart disease, the study shows.

“When you start looking at some of the data, it’s not that (rural Mainers) don’t have doctors and hospitals and good medical care, it’s that they have low high school graduation rates and lower rates of kids going to college,” Deatrick said. “Poverty and education are the two biggest factors that determine how good or bad your health is going to be.”

But social factors may not explain all of the trends.

Maine’s high rate of cancer, for example, is well documented but not well understood. Maine’s rate was the highest in the nation in 2007 and remains relatively high, the report says.

It’s not clear whether Maine’s cancer incidence rate is due to better medical screening, environmental risks such as contaminated water and air or other factors. The new health report recommends a statewide study of Maine’s elevated cancer rate and what can be done to reduce it.

Maine’s cancer rates are probably the result of a number of factors and some research on that and other questions is already under way, said Stephen Sears, Maine’s state epidemiologist and acting director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The county-by-county breakdowns in the new report will help focus research and resources, according to Sears.

Although cancer rates are relatively high statewide, the report shows that cancer patients are more likely to survive the disease in some counties than in others. That needs more study but could be related to varying levels of access to medical care, the report says.

Higher rates of hospital emergency department use in rural counties, including for preventable conditions such as dental pain, also suggest a need for greater access to health and dental care in those parts of the state, the report says.

The findings confirm that substance abuse is a leading, and growing, public health problem statewide. But the problem varies by county.

Maine’s prescription drug abuse epidemic is most severe in Piscataquis and Washington counties, for example. In fact, substance abuse was the most commonly cited health problem in Washington County, according to the report.

Alcohol, on the other hand, remains the leading drug of choice statewide and especially in Cumberland County, which has the highest rate of chronic heavy drinking.

“In some cases, Maine is very homogeneous and in other cases, there’s a lot of diversity,” Deatrick said.

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

 

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