The County Health Rankings show us that where we live matters to our health. The health of a community depends on many different factors - ranging from health behaviors, education and jobs, to quality of health care, to the environment.

Why are there no measures for key risk factors such as blood pressure or salt intake or measures for children and teens?

We acknowledge that there are other important measures of health that we do not include, e.g. blood pressure, salt intake, child obesity, teen smoking, teen alcohol use.  Including such measures would be helpful but unfortunately, county-level data on these risk factors are not consistently available in enough states for us to incorporate such measures at this time.