Read this first

This page ranks states on one survey answer. It ranks no providers, no towns and no facilities, and it has nothing to say about residential memory care.

Everyone counted here had already told the survey that their memory was getting worse. The figures are a share of that group and of nobody else, so they cannot be read as a share of all older adults, and they say nothing about the person you care for.

If the practical side of this is what you need, the page to read is what a day of support at home looks like. If the question is medical, it belongs with the person's doctor.

Memory loss gets in the way for three in ten who report it

Of the older Missourians who say their memory is getting worse, roughly three in ten say it has started to interfere with the things a household runs on: chores, errands, seeing people. Across the river the share is far higher, and the gap is the most striking thing in this survey.

Memory Care at Home STL desk. Published September 10, 2026.

There is a difference between noticing and being stopped. A person can know perfectly well that their memory is slipping and still run their own kitchen, keep their own appointments and turn up to church on Sunday. For a long time, that is most people.

This page is about the point where that stops being true. The survey behind it asks the people who reported memory trouble a follow-up: does it interfere with your ability to take part in social activities or do household chores. Not whether they have been diagnosed with anything, and not whether they need someone else to step in, which is a separate question with its own page. Just whether the ordinary shape of a week has started to give.

It is a gentle question and a useful one, because household chores and social life are precisely the ground that non-medical support at home stands on. Nobody comes to the house to treat a condition. They come so that the laundry gets done, the shopping happens, and the person is not alone with the day. A survey figure about interference is, in the plainest sense, a survey figure about the need for that kind of company.

Methodology

Metric: among adults aged 65 and over who reported subjective cognitive decline or memory loss, the percentage who reported that it interferes with their ability to engage in social activities or household chores. Sorted highest first. The denominator is the group reporting cognitive decline, not the whole older population.

Source: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Aging Data, resource hfr9-rurv, collected through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Public domain.

Row selector: Class = Cognitive Decline, QuestionID = Q31, topic TCC02, YearStart = 2019, YearEnd = 2022, StratificationCategoryID1 = AGE with StratificationID1 = 65PLUS, and StratificationCategoryID2 = OVERALL.

De-duplication: the dataset files two row families under YearStart 2019, one ending 2019 and one ending 2022, and they are not copies of each other. Only the YearEnd 2022 family is used here, because it is the only one that covers every reporting jurisdiction. The five regional and national roll-up rows are excluded, CDC-suppressed rows are excluded, and a jurisdiction enters only if all four Cognitive Decline questions carry a value for it, which gives 46. For Missouri both row families report the same value on this question.

Survey years: the series is filed under a 2019 start year and a 2022 end year, and Missouri did not field this module in 2022, so the figure is the CDC's published series estimate, not a single-year reading. Pulled September 10, 2026 into engine/data/cdc_cognitive_decline.json. Full detail on the methodology page.

Where Missouri lands, and where Illinois does

In Missouri, 29.1 percent of older adults who reported memory loss said it interferes with social activities or household chores. That places the state 26 of 46, almost exactly in the middle of the table. The confidence range the CDC publishes runs from 22.8 to 36.2 percent.

Illinois reports 49.2 percent and ranks 1 of 46, the highest in the whole series. Its range, from 34.8 to 63.7 percent, is also the widest in the table by a distance, which is the survey's way of saying that the Illinois sample on this question was small. The top of Missouri's range and the bottom of Illinois's overlap by a little over a point, so the difference between the two states is real in the estimates and not quite settled in the ranges. It should be held loosely.

What is not in doubt is the spread of the table as a whole. Eight jurisdictions sit at forty percent or above, Illinois first and then the District of Columbia at 44.1 percent. Five sit below twenty, down to Colorado at 15.1. Missouri, at 29.1, is closer to the quiet end of that spread than the loud one, and a family here should probably take that as reassurance about the state and nothing more.

The denominator, once more

These are not shares of all older adults. They are shares of the smaller group who had already said their memory was getting worse. In Missouri that first group is a little over one in nine older adults, and it is ranked separately on the by-state page. A state where few people admit to memory trouble may be a state where only the people with the most trouble say so, which pushes this second figure up. Illinois is a case in point: it sits near the bottom of the first table and at the top of this one.

Every jurisdiction in the series

All 46 states and jurisdictions with a complete set of figures in this series, highest first. Missouri is shaded, Illinois is lightly shaded. The range is the confidence interval the CDC publishes with each estimate.
Rank	State or jurisdiction	Interferes with chores or social life	Range
1	Illinois	49.2%	34.8 to 63.7
2	District of Columbia	44.1%	32.8 to 56.1
3	Mississippi	43.8%	37.4 to 50.5
4	New York	43.3%	36.4 to 50.5
5	Louisiana	42.4%	32.9 to 52.6
6	Rhode Island	41.5%	31.8 to 51.9
7	North Carolina	41.4%	29.3 to 54.6
8	Kentucky	40.5%	29.8 to 52.2
9	Tennessee	39.7%	33.1 to 46.8
10	Hawaii	38.7%	30.5 to 47.6
11	Texas	38.5%	32.9 to 44.4
12	Arkansas	36.2%	28.3 to 45.0
13	Oklahoma	36.2%	29.2 to 43.9
14	Alabama	35.6%	28.9 to 43.0
15	Florida	35.3%	24.8 to 47.6
16	South Carolina	34.2%	28.3 to 40.5
17	California	34.0%	24.0 to 45.7
18	New Mexico	33.9%	26.0 to 42.8
19	Georgia	33.2%	26.7 to 40.3
20	Pennsylvania	32.6%	24.1 to 42.3
21	West Virginia	32.3%	25.3 to 40.2
22	Michigan	31.4%	24.9 to 38.8
23	New Hampshire	30.8%	22.7 to 40.3
24	Iowa	30.3%	21.4 to 41.0
25	Washington	30.3%	23.6 to 37.9
26	Missouri	29.1%	22.8 to 36.2
27	Ohio	29.0%	22.7 to 36.2
28	Indiana	27.7%	21.7 to 34.6
29	Utah	27.3%	22.4 to 32.9
30	Wisconsin	26.6%	21.3 to 32.7
31	Wyoming	26.4%	17.8 to 37.3
32	Connecticut	26.3%	15.3 to 41.5
33	Maryland	26.1%	17.8 to 36.6
34	Maine	25.8%	20.2 to 32.4
35	Kansas	25.7%	19.3 to 33.4
36	Nebraska	25.2%	19.6 to 31.9
37	Oregon	25.2%	17.4 to 35.0
38	Virginia	24.7%	20.6 to 29.4
39	Vermont	21.9%	15.9 to 29.4
40	Idaho	21.6%	16.2 to 28.3
41	Arizona	20.5%	15.1 to 27.2
42	Alaska	19.9%	11.7 to 31.7
43	Minnesota	18.3%	14.0 to 23.4
44	Nevada	18.1%	12.9 to 24.8
45	North Dakota	16.7%	11.6 to 23.5
46	Colorado	15.1%	10.6 to 20.9

The five lowest in the series

The bottom of the table is worth a look on its own, because it is where the ranges get tight and the figures get small. These five are ordered from the lowest upwards.

Colorado, 15.1 percent of those reporting memory loss, range 10.6 to 20.9
North Dakota, 16.7 percent of those reporting memory loss, range 11.6 to 23.5
Nevada, 18.1 percent of those reporting memory loss, range 12.9 to 24.8
Minnesota, 18.3 percent of those reporting memory loss, range 14.0 to 23.4
Alaska, 19.9 percent of those reporting memory loss, range 11.7 to 31.7

What interfering does not mean

It does not mean a diagnosis. Nobody in this survey was examined, tested or seen by a clinician as part of answering it. A person who says memory trouble interferes with their chores may have any of a long list of things going on, several of which are treatable, and the only way to find out which is the appointment this site keeps pointing at.

It does not mean the person needs someone else in the house. That is the next question in the survey, and the survey asks it separately for a reason. Interference is the stage where a household starts to compensate: lists on the fridge, a neighbour who checks in, a daughter who does the big shop. Needing help is the stage where compensating is no longer enough. Missouri ranks in the middle on the first and near the top on the second, which suggests that, here, the gap between the two stages may be shorter than families expect.

And it does not mean anything about where to live. Interference with chores is, if anything, the case for support at home rather than against it, because chores are the thing a caregiver in the house takes on. The National Institute on Aging's guidance on adapting activities for people with Alzheimer's disease is written for exactly this territory, and it assumes the person is at home.

Featured placement

New Plan Care

Non-medical support at home for households in Ballwin, Chesterfield, Eureka, Glencoe, Grover, Pacific, St. Louis and Valley Park.

Call (314) 405-0887

About this listing. New Plan Care is a client of OwnersFirm, the firm that publishes this site, and this space is paid placement. Nothing in the table above scored it, ranked it or so much as mentioned it, because this page ranks states on a survey answer and ranks no provider at all. What New Plan Care offers is non-medical: someone who comes to the house on a schedule and helps with meals, routine, company and keeping an eye on things. It does not diagnose, treat or replace a doctor, and neither do we. Call (314) 405-0887.