Health Status
Frequent Physical Distress by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Frequent physical distress mirrors the mental-distress measure on the somatic side: adults reporting their physical health was "not good" on 14 or more days in the past 30. The 14-day threshold is consequential — at that frequency, the symptom pattern is severe enough to disrupt work, caregiving, and daily life. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate. High-prevalence counties tend to overlap with the chronic-disease belt and with counties where occupational injury rates are also high; the survey does not separate causes.
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 Frequent Physical Distress Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported frequent physical distress prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Frequent Physical Distress.
Highest Frequent Physical Distress Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported frequent physical distress prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Frequent Physical Distress.
What this ranking suggests
Physical distress is the lived-experience downstream of the chronic-disease rankings — what residents feel, not what is documented in a chart. Reading it alongside the disability rankings and the chronic-disease prevalence rankings tells a fuller picture of how disease translates into daily life.
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: PHLTH.