Current Issues in Chronic Diseases: A Focus on Dementia and Hypertension in Rural West Texans

Dementia and hypertension are chronic diseases that affect elderly populations worldwide. The prevalence of these diseases increases each year, especially in rural and underserved rural communities like West Texas. The purpose of this study was to find risk factors of dementia and their impact on rural West Texans. Data was provided by the Project FRONTIER for rural West Texas counties. The SPSS software package was used for statistical analysis. Pearson's chi-squared test was also utilized to determine the relationships between the risk factors considering a level of significance (α)  = 0.05. The findings have shown that age group had significant associations with hypertension, cerebral, neurologic disease, Romberg test, and muscle strength for both males and females (p≤0.002). Hypertension was significantly associated with cognitive disorder and diabetes in both males and females (p≤0.011). Age group in females was significantly associated with parkinsonism (p = 0.02), neurological stroke (p = 0.002), reflexes (p = 0.003), and sensory intact (hands/feet) (p = 0.004), respectively, whereas age for males was not significantly associated with those variables (p = 0.29, p = 0.05, p = 0.56, and p = 0.76, respectively). Hypertension in females was significantly associated with cardiovascular disease (p = 0.001) and depression (p = 0.001) but was not found to be significant for males (p = 0.30 and p = 0.09, respectively). Both males and females in Hispanic and non-Hispanic groups were found to be significantly associated with Alzheimer's disease (p = 0.0001 and p = 0.045, respectively). Hispanic and non-Hispanic females were found to be significantly associated with hypertension (p = 0.026). Gender-specific differences in dementia risk factors exist and integrating such variables may guide relevant policymaking to reduce dementia incidence in rural West Texas.