ST. LOUIS • Get ready to get active, rural southeast Missouri.
A Washington University researcher is bringing his work — funded with a $2.9 million federal grant — to different parts of southeast Missouri in an attempt to promote physical activity in rural communities.
Ross Brownson, Washington University Brown School professor and director of the Prevention Research Center in St. Louis, received the grant for his five-year project from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute.
The first nine months are all developmental, and the work has already begun, Brownson said.
They’re developing the team who will work on the project, identifying which six sites — or towns — will be their experiment’s control, and which six sites they’ll conduct the experiment in.
People are also reading…
The goal is relatively simple: Small communities with less than 10,000 people have some of the lowest rates of physical activity, Brownson said.
So what if they are able to reach out to community members through text messages and other means and find ways to encourage them to simply get out and walk? That’s the premise of his study.
“There are notable disparities in rates of physical activity in rural communities, with rural residents at higher risk for cancer and other chronic diseases,” Brownson said in a statement. “Given that rural residents make up 15 percent of the population, there is an imperative to develop and implement interventions to promote physical activity.”
They get to the residents through public health centers, civic organizations and direct phone recruitment, he said.
They’re searching for communities among 13 counties in southeast Missouri that range from 5,000 to 20,000 people in size.
Brownson hopes to be out in the communities doing the actual “intervention” part of the study by spring of 2018. That will continue through year four, and the final year of the study will be about data analysis.