Matters of the heart: cardiovascular disease and rural nursing.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States and around the world. Most of the work done on CVD among rural populations uses mortality versus prevalence rates because prevalence data for rural populations is difficult, if not impossible, to find in national data sets as currently published. Cardiovascular disease is a significant threat to rural dwellers and those in rural nursing need evidence on which to base their practice. This chapter provides an examination of the CVD literature as it relates to rural populations with an emphasis on studies that include or are limited to rural women as subjects. Topics reviewed included: awareness and symptoms of heart disease among women, heart failure (HF) in rural women, hypertension (HTN) in rural areas, stroke in rural populations, quality care in acute myocardial infarction (MI) in rural facilities, mortality and CVD, and CVD risk factors in rural populations. The authors reviewed 134 research articles published between 2000 and 2007. Overall, the CVD research literature in rural populations has small sample sizes, except for epidemiologic studies, and tends to be descriptive in nature. There is a dearth of literature on prevalence among rural populations from a national perspective and little is written on interventions to reduce CVD risks and physiological markers that include large samples from rural populations. Future nursing research on CVD in rural populations needs to move beyond the descriptive to intervention studies, which need to be robust in power to guard against Type II errors.