Dane Van Domelen
vandomed@gmail.com
2020-02-23
You can install nhanesdata from GitHub by running:
devtools::install_github("vandomed/nhanesdata")The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is an ongoing, nationally representative study of Americans. Since 1999, NHANES has collected cross-sectional data in 2-year cycles, with roughly 10,000 participants included in each cycle. The data is freely available to download from the NHANES website, but the source files are large, and it’s tedious going through and individually downloading each file that includes a variable you’re interested in.
This package simply includes (virtually) all of the data from 1999-2016.
Once you install the package, you can access any dataset in R by
referring to the file name of interest. For example, the demographics
files are named demo for 1999-2000, demo_b for 2001-2002, demo_c
for 2003-2004, and so on. So if you want to, say, generate a histogram
of age for the 1999-2000 cycle, you can run:
hist(demo$RIDAGEYR, main = "Age Distribution in NHANES 1999-2000", xlab = "Age (years)")
The datasets are current as of Feb. 22, 2020. I plan to check for updates and new datasets every few months. Please note that data from the 2017-2018 cycle has not yet been released.