README.Rmd

---
output: github_document
title: "Data from Continuous NHANES (Years 1999-2016)"
author: "Dane Van Domelen <br> vandomed@gmail.com <br>"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
---

<!-- README.md is generated from README.Rmd. Please edit that file -->


```{r setup, include = FALSE}

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  eval = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "README-",
  message = FALSE
)

# Load packages
library("nhanesdata")
```


## Installation

You can install **nhanesdata** from GitHub by running:

```{r eval = FALSE}
devtools::install_github("vandomed/nhanesdata")
```


## Brief summary

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](https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/continuousnhanes/default.aspx?BeginYear=1999), 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:

```{r eval = TRUE}
hist(demo$RIDAGEYR, main = "Age Distribution in NHANES 1999-2000", xlab = "Age (years)")
```


# Updates

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.