By CRAIG FREILICH

St. Lawrence County residents have higher-than-average rates of poor health, tobacco smokers and obesity, but ranks about average in physical inactivity and teen births.

But county obesity rates have improved slightly in recent years and the county’s mammography screening rate is better than the state average.

Those assessments are from data compiled by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and viewable at http://bit.ly/1WGzOtK.

St. Lawrence County ranks 51st out of 62 counties in New York in terms of health outcomes, such as length of life and quality of life. The county is the fifth worst, at 58th, in health factors such as behaviors (smoking, obesity) and clinical care (availability of primary care doctors).

In St. Lawrence County, 18 percent of adults are smokers, compared with 14 percent of adults statewide.

In 2012, 29 percent of adults in the county were obese, compared with 25 percent statewide, based on a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or more. But that was an improvement from earlier years when county obesity rates peaked at 32 percent in 2009.

Physical inactivity by county residents age 20 and older reporting no leisure-time activity stood at 25 percent, similar to the statewide average of 24 percent.

But again, the trend seems to be improving in St. Lawrence County: at the peak in 2009, more than 30 percent of adults were inactive

St. Lawrence County ranks higher than the statewide average when it comes to excessive drinking and alcohol-impaired driving deaths.

In the county, 20 percent of adults reported partaking in binge or heavy drinking while 17 percent of adults in the state reported such behavior.

In 2012, with the latest data available, 39 percent of driving deaths in the county had some alcohol involvement, while across the state only 14 percent of driving deaths had an alcohol impairment component.

The rate jumped to over 60 percent in 2009 and then dropped to below 20 percent in 2010, likely due to the effect of the small population of the county and how just one or two cases from one year to the next can have a dramatic effect on the percentages.

The proportion of primary care physicians is deemed to be a potential factor in the health of a population.

In St. Lawrence County, the ratio of primary care doctors stood at 1,840 people per doctor in 2013 compared to the state average of 1,200 people per doctor.

One bright spot in the county was the mammography screening rate, a county’s percentage of female Medicare enrollees ages 67-69 that got the screening, which at 70 percent in 2013 was better than both the state and U.S. averages of about 62 percent.

As far as “premature death” is concerned, St. Lawrence County “lost” 6,500 years compared with the New York county average of 5,400. “Years lost” represents people who died before age 75 per 100,000 population. The numbers reported are three-year averages.

While the state and national “premature deaths” seem to be on a slow decline, St. Lawrence County showed barely any decline from 1997 to 2013.

The number of teen births in St. Lawrence County was comparable to the state average. Births per 1,000 15- to 19-year-old females was 22 in St. Lawrence County compared with a county average of 23 in the state.