st: Question re analysing icd10 code data

[Katrina Roper <katrina@ivelo.net>]

Dear Stata group users,

I have a new data set that I am having difficulty analysing.

The dataset contains 44 fields for icd10 (hospital) codes.  There are  
many hundreds of codes, and these can be put in any one of the columns.
For example, I am interested in the alcohol codes, of which there are  
17.
The codes are in string form. The alcohol codes are for example Y90,  
Y90.0, Y90.1, Y91, Y91.0 etc etc in 17 different forms.

What I want to do is find every time any one of the 17 different  
alcohol codes appears in any one of the 44 columns.

I tried this:

gen alcohol=.
foreach v of varlist varname1 - varname44 {
replace alcohol=1 if (`v'==Y90|`v'==Y90.1|`v'==Y90.2| until `v'==Y91.9)
}

: but it didn't work, I suspect maybe because the data is in string  
form.

Basically is there any way of doing a Boolean type search using Stata  
to answer the question:
For any column icd1-icd44 find/count where the variable == Y90* | Y91*

Or something like that.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Katrina,
Australia

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/