Prevention
Cholesterol Screening by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · 2,956/3,144 reporting counties (94% coverage)
Cholesterol screening tracks the share of adults aged 18+ who report having had a blood-cholesterol check within the past five years. It is a standard primary-care prevention indicator that the US Preventive Services Task Force has endorsed for decades. The county-level rankings closely track insurance coverage, primary-care availability, and Medicare uptake — older counties with strong Medicare coverage often rank high. The five-year window is generous compared to clinical-guideline cycles, so the rate is high in most counties.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. 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.
Highest Cholesterol Screening Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the highest reported cholesterol screening rates — these counties lead the nation on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Cholesterol Screening.
Lowest Cholesterol Screening Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the lowest reported cholesterol screening rates.
Worst 100 counties for Cholesterol Screening.
What this ranking suggests
Cholesterol screening is the upstream gate that makes the HIGHCHOL prevalence ranking meaningful — a county cannot diagnose hyperlipidemia in residents who have never been screened. Read the two rankings together: high screening + low diagnosis is the best cardiovascular shape, low screening + low diagnosis is hidden disease.
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. Exact observed/total coverage is reported above. Rows without a reported estimate are excluded for this measure. An absent value may reflect source availability or suppression; the checked-in artifact does not attribute every missing value to one cause. 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.
By HealthByCounty Editorial Team
Page revised
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 measure year. Measure ID: CHOLSCREEN.