Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Methods For Dealing With Death And Missing Data, And For Standardizing Different Health Variables In Longitudinal Datasets: The Cardiovascular Health Study, Paula Diehr

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Longitudinal studies of older adults usually need to account for deaths and missing data. The study databases often include multiple health-related variables, whose trends over time are hard to compare because they were measured on different scales. Here we present a unified approach to these three problems that was developed and used in the Cardiovascular Health Study. Data were first transformed to a new scale that had integer/ratio properties, and on which “dead” logically takes the value zero. Missing data were then imputed on this new scale, using each person’s own data over time. Imputation could thus be informed by …