NHANES III now linked to mortality

The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), 1988-94, contains data for 33,994 persons ages 2 months and older who participated in the survey. It includes medical history, laboratory testing, physical examination, dietary survey, electrocardiograms, spirometry, audiometry, dental examination, social and economic factors and on and on. It has been the source of hundreds of research articles. It was strictly cross-sectional, with no long-term follow-up...till now. The CDC has updated the mortality linkage of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) to death certificate data found in the National Death Index (NDI). The updated NHANES III Linked Mortality File provides mortality follow-up data from the date of NHANES III survey participation (1988-1994) through December 31, 2006. Mortality ascertainment is based upon the results from a probabilistic match between NHANES III and NDI death certificate records. Linkage of the NHANES III survey participants with the NDI provides the opportunity to conduct a vast array of outcome studies designed to investigate the association of a wide variety of health factors with mortality.

Even better, I have downloaded the data, linked the files together, cleaned it up and ported it to STATA. If you want to analyze it, please contact me.

Ben