Rural Health Survey of Men over Forty

A PPLICATION of preventive medicine to the later years of life is gaining attention from public health agencies.This is partly due to the remarkable decline in the mortality of children and young adults, which has brought the problems of morbidity and mortality in middle life into prominence, and partly to the failure of therapy in preventing the alarming rise in the death rates from certain diseases, such as coronary thrombosis and cancer of the lung, which bear most heavily on men in middle and later life.t survey in 1955 was designed to find out something about the state of health, especially of the heart and lungs, of a group of men over the age of 40 who were living in a rural com- munity.The study population, living or work- ing in 6 of 16 towns of the Nashoba Health District in Massachusetts, was composed of all the men in the chosen age group who wished to be examined.Altogether, 642 men came for examination.