Health Outcomes
Coronary Heart Disease by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Coronary heart disease — heart attack, angina, or coronary artery disease ever diagnosed — is one of the longest-running BRFSS questions. PLACES models the county prevalence and age-adjusts it, which matters: CHD is heavily age-dependent. After age adjustment, high-prevalence counties cluster in central Appalachia, the lower Mississippi Delta, and parts of the rural South. The measure is diagnosis-anchored, so counties with good cardiac-care access can register higher prevalence simply because more residents have been worked up; counties with poor access can show lower prevalence and worse outcomes.
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 Coronary Heart Disease Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported coronary heart disease prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Coronary Heart Disease.
Highest Coronary Heart Disease Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported coronary heart disease prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Coronary Heart Disease.
What this ranking suggests
CHD prevalence reflects a long arc of risk-factor exposure — smoking history, hypertension, cholesterol, diabetes — and an unequal arc of medical access. The rankings here are most useful when read alongside the smoking, BPHIGH, HIGHCHOL, and DIABETES rankings for the same county; the four together describe a cardiovascular risk profile no single measure can.
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: CHD.