Abstract #301832

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JSM 2003 Abstract #301832
Activity Number: 289
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2003 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Health Policy Statistics
Abstract - #301832
Title: Can We Just "Set the Deaths to Zero" ?
Author(s): Paula H. Diehr*+
Companies: University of Washington
Address: Box 357232, Seattle, WA, 98195-7232,
Keywords: health ; death ; longitudinal ; missing ; quality of life
Abstract:

In tracking a health-related variable ("health") over time, deaths are a nuisance. Omitting them gives a distorted picture of changes over time. It is common to assign death a low value of health, or 0. A logical value for death is needed. Health could be dichotomized as healthy/not healthy, with the deaths reasonably assigned to the "not healthy" category. Or, health can be transformed to the probability of being healthy in 1 year, conditional on the observed health; deaths are logically set to zero. The transformed variables are interpretable. This approach has been implemented for self-rated health (excellent to poor) and for the SF-36. We applied the approach to other health-related variables, including activities of daily living, depression, bed days, cognition, timed walk, recent hospitalization, blocks walked recently, body mass index, and blood pressure. Our goal is to provide transformation equations for each variable and to review how useful each transformation is, with the goal of creating guidelines for which variables can usefully be transformed in this way. We also discuss the choice of definition of "healthy" and what data should be used.

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