Articles: disease.
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Rural America faces an alarming obesity crisis, with residents experiencing significantly higher rates of obesity due to socioeconomic disparities, limited access to healthcare, and structural challenges such as food deserts and insufficient healthcare infrastructure. This perspective addresses these pressing issues by proposing targeted, evidence-based interventions to reduce obesity in rural communities. ⋯ R. 1577, the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, to alleviate financial barriers to treatment, including intensive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy; and (3) leveraging community-based programs, including the National Rural Obesity and Chronic Disease Initiative, the CDC's High Obesity Program, and the Delta Body and Soul initiative, to improve access to healthy foods and promote physical activity through local collaborations, education, and infrastructure enhancements. By implementing these comprehensive strategies, we aim to make obesity treatments and healthy lifestyle choices more accessible, ultimately reducing obesity rates, improving health outcomes, and enhancing the overall quality of life for rural residents across the USA.
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Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for coronary heart disease (CHD) are a growing clinical and commercial reality. Whether existing scores provide similar individual-level assessments of disease susceptibility remains incompletely characterized. ⋯ CHD PRSs that performed similarly at the population level demonstrated highly variable individual-level estimates of risk. Recognizing that CHD PRSs may generate incongruent individual-level risk estimates, effective clinical implementation will require refined statistical methods to quantify uncertainty and new strategies to communicate this uncertainty to patients and clinicians.