By Jacqueline Howard / CNN
There's no question that the impact of diseases varies drastically across the United States, depending on which state you live in.
Now, a study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA details just how wide those state-by-state differences are when it comes to how diseases, injuries and risk factors impact America's youth, adults and older populations."There's so many different levels of health in the U.S., so many different disparities across states and age groups," said Dr. Christopher Murray, a Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who was lead author of the study.
"The top five risk factors – diet, obesity, elevated blood pressure, tobacco and physical inactivity – explain an awful lot of the differences across states," he said. "Why those causes are getting worse in some states and not getting worse in the other states, I think, deserves more investigation."
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