Most Prevalent Diseases/Conditions Affecting U.S. Women

One important distinction first: “most prevalent” is not the same as “leading cause of death.” If we rank diseases by how many U.S. women live with them, the order looks very different from a mortality ranking.

Because there is no single CDC/NIH dataset that ranks every disease in women using the same methodology and year, the most defensible approach is to combine the best recent national prevalence estimates and clearly label where the estimates are comparable—and where they aren't.

Most prevalent diseases/conditions affecting U.S. women

Rank	Disease / condition	Estimated prevalence among U.S. women	Approx. women affected	Why it ranks highly
1	Obesity	41.3% of women ≥20	~55 million	One of the most common chronic health conditions; strongly associated with diabetes, heart disease, stroke and several cancers
2	Hypertension (high blood pressure)	44.6% of women ≥18	~115 million adults overall; tens of millions of women	Extremely common, particularly after menopause; major risk factor for heart disease and stroke
3	Arthritis	21.5% of women ≥18	~28+ million	Women have substantially higher prevalence than men (21.5% vs. 16.1%)
4	Autoimmune diseases — collectively	~5.8% of women	~9.7 million	Approximately 4 in 5 people diagnosed with autoimmune disease are female; includes lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's, MS and others
5	Asthma	~11% of adult women	~14.5 million	Female adult prevalence is substantially higher than male prevalence
6	Diabetes	~10%+ of women, depending on definition/age	Tens of millions	Major chronic disease; prevalence increases sharply with age
7	Heart disease	~44% of U.S. women according to CDC's broad "some form of heart disease" measure	>60 million	Particularly important because it is the #1 killer of women
8	Cancer	Large lifetime/ever-diagnosed burden	Millions	#2 cause of death; breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women
9	Chronic kidney disease	Several-million-woman burden	Millions	Often underdiagnosed; women experience a substantial CKD burden
10	Osteoporosis / low bone density	Particularly high after menopause	Millions	Disproportionately affects women and drives fractures, disability and loss of independence

There is an important caveat with that table: the first several entries cannot be treated as a mathematically precise 1–10 league table, because the studies use different definitions, age ranges and survey methods. For example, CDC's 41.3% obesity figure applies to women age 20+, while its 21.5% arthritis estimate applies to adults 18+. Heart disease is also defined more broadly in the CDC women's-health statistic than the clinical disease categories used in some other surveys.

1. Obesity — ~41.3%

CDC estimates that 41.3% of U.S. women age 20 and older have obesity. That's an enormous population burden—roughly four in ten adult women.

Obesity is particularly important because it isn't isolated: it substantially increases the risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and several cancers.

2. Hypertension — 44.6%

This is arguably the most prevalent disease state on the list.

CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimated that 44.6% of U.S. women age 18+ had hypertension during August 2021–August 2023. Prevalence rises dramatically with age.

Hypertension is especially important for women because it is a major contributor to:

heart disease
stroke
kidney disease
pregnancy complications
vascular dementia

3. Arthritis — 21.5%

CDC found that 21.5% of adult women had diagnosed arthritis in 2022, compared with 16.1% of men. That's roughly one woman in five.

The prevalence rises enormously with age: CDC reported arthritis in 53.9% of adults ≥75.

4. Autoimmune disease — ~5.8%

This category deserves special attention because of the enormous sex disparity.

A large U.S. electronic-health-record study covering 105 autoimmune diseases estimated that approximately 9.7 million U.S. women (5.8%) had at least one autoimmune disease. The corresponding estimate for men was 3.5%.

NIH summarizes the broader literature as finding that approximately four out of every five people diagnosed with an autoimmune disease are female.

This category includes diseases such as:

rheumatoid arthritis
lupus
multiple sclerosis
Sjögren's disease
autoimmune thyroid disease
psoriasis/psoriatic disease
inflammatory bowel diseases
type 1 diabetes

The individual diseases are much less prevalent than hypertension or obesity, but collectively autoimmune disease represents a very large women's-health burden.

5. Asthma — ~11% of adult women

CDC's 2023 National Health Interview Survey estimated 14.47 million adult women with current asthma, representing 11.0% of adult women.

The sex difference is notable: women had substantially higher prevalence than men.

An earlier CDC analysis found adult asthma prevalence of 9.8% in women versus 6.2% in men.

But if you mean "which diseases kill women the most?"

That ranking is much clearer—and arguably more important medically.

Using the latest final U.S. mortality data (2024), CDC reports that the overall leading causes of death were heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, chronic lower-respiratory disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease and suicide.

For women specifically, the latest detailed CDC sex-specific table available from the NCHS report shows this pattern:

Leading causes of death among U.S. women

1. Heart disease
304,970 female deaths in 2023; approximately 20.7% of all female deaths. CDC explicitly identifies heart disease as the leading cause of death for women.

2. Cancer
Approximately 19.8% of female deaths in 2023.

3. Stroke
Approximately 6.2% of female deaths.

4. Alzheimer's disease
Approximately 5.3%. Alzheimer's has a particularly large impact on women because women live longer on average and constitute a large majority of people living with Alzheimer's disease.

5. Chronic lower respiratory disease
Approximately 5.3%.

6. Unintentional injuries/accidents
Approximately 5.0%.

7. Diabetes
Approximately 2.7%.

8. Kidney disease
Approximately 1.8%.

9. COVID-19
Approximately 1.6% in 2023.

10. Hypertension
Approximately 1.5%.

The CDC's underlying 2023 mortality report is particularly useful because it breaks the rankings down by sex rather than simply giving the overall U.S. ranking.

The most important takeaway

If your goal is to understand the diseases that affect women most, rather than simply the diseases that kill the most women, I would organize the women's-health burden into these broad tiers:

Very high prevalence

Hypertension
Obesity
Arthritis
Heart disease
Asthma

High collective burden / disproportionately female

Autoimmune diseases
Diabetes
Depression and anxiety disorders
Osteoporosis/osteopenia
Chronic kidney disease

Major disease-specific women's-health burdens

Breast cancer
Endometriosis
Migraine
Thyroid disease
Gynecologic disorders such as uterine fibroids and PCOS

And there's a crucial distinction: prevalence does not equal severity. For example, hypertension may affect vastly more women than breast cancer, but breast cancer produces a much larger disease-specific cancer burden. Conversely, heart disease affects enormous numbers of women and is the leading killer.

Breast cancer as an example

In 2022, 279,731 new cases of female breast cancer were reported in the U.S., and 42,213 women died from breast cancer in 2023.

Diabetes

CDC's latest National Diabetes Statistics Report estimates 40.1 million Americans had diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes in 2023, or 12.0% of the population. Men have somewhat higher prevalence than women, so diabetes is extremely important to women's health but isn't uniquely female.

Why heart disease deserves special emphasis

The CDC estimates that more than 60 million U.S. women (44%) are living with some form of heart disease, and 304,970 women died from it in 2023. That makes cardiovascular disease simultaneously one of the country's largest women's-health burdens and its leading cause of female death.