topic Re: Use value of variable as variable name in SAS Programming

Use value of variable as variable name

bg — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:30:38 GMT

MED01 HTN DM MAIN01

HTN 0 0

DM 1 1

HTN 0 1

HTN 0 0

DM 0 1

I have a large database with information on medications taken by a few thousand people. I need to determine if a medication is a maintenance medication.

As an example above is a small snippet just looking at one medication for 5 people and a couple of disease conditions, HTN and DM

I need to compute the value of MAIN01...1 if a medication is a maintenance med and 0 if not

For example for the first observation, I look at the value of MED01 and I see that a HTN drug was used so I need to check if person has HTN . If HTN=1 then MAIN01=1 else MAIN01=0.

For the second observation, I look at the value of MED01 and see that I need to check if person has DM. If DM=1 thenn MAIN01=1 else MAIN01=0

So the resulting data set would be

MED01 HTN DM MAIN01

HTN 0 0 0

DM 1 1 1

HTN 0 1 0

HTN 1 0 1

DM 0 1 1

Any suggestions as to how I could code this?

thanks!

Barbara

Re: Use value of variable as variable name

LarryWorley — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:40:16 GMT

How about:

Main01 = ( med01 = 'HTN')*htn or (med01 = 'DM')*dm ;

If logical expressions are not you cup of tea, you could also use if-then logic.

Re: Use value of variable as variable name

art297 — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:46:31 GMT

Assuming there is a discrepancy in the data you showed in your have and want examples (namely for the 4th record), then the following would be easy to implement for any number of drugs:

data have;

input MED01 $ HTN DM;

cards;

HTN 0 0

DM 1 1

HTN 0 1

HTN 1 0

DM 0 1

;

data want;

set have;

array drugs htn--dm;

do over drugs;

if med01 eq vname(drugs) and drugs eq 1 then MAIN01=1;

end;

if missing(MAIN01) then MAIN01=0;

run;

Re: Use value of variable as variable name

bg — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:03:40 GMT

Thanks!

Re: Use value of variable as variable name

bg — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:04:20 GMT

Thanks!