Health Outcomes
Arthritis Prevalence by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Arthritis is the umbrella the CDC uses for any doctor-diagnosed arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, lupus, or fibromyalgia among adults. The PLACES program models county prevalence from BRFSS telephone survey responses, then age-adjusts to the 2000 US population so a retirement-heavy county is not compared to a college-town county on raw numbers. The measure tracks the share of adults living with diagnosed joint disease, not severity or treatment. Counties on the high end of arthritis prevalence tend to coincide with older average age and a history of physically demanding labor — the survey cannot tell us why someone reported the diagnosis, only that they did.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Arthritis Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported arthritis prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Arthritis.
Highest Arthritis Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported arthritis prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Arthritis.
What this ranking suggests
Arthritis prevalence is a slow-moving indicator that follows population age, occupational history, and obesity prevalence. The rankings are useful for understanding the long-term care burden a county faces; they are not a snapshot of disease activity in any given year.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: ARTHRITIS.