st: repeated measures

[Michael Eisenberg <meisenberg713@gmail.com>]

Colleagues,

I have a problem I hope you can help with that involves cleaning a
dataset for analysis.

I have a dataset with about 10K men.  Several men had multiple clinic
visits, so that there are about 12K observations.  There is also some
lab data that I'll need that was not obtained until follow up visits.

I would like to only analyze data from the earliest visit and the
first available lab data.

Can stata do this?


Turn this

patient     visitdate    sbp       dm          glu
1              1/1/09       140       .             .
1              1/4/09       128       .            202
1              2/1/09       131      1            .

2              4/1/09       160      .             341
2              4/4/09       144       .            180
2              5/1/09       170      1            .

3              6/1/09       119       .             .
3              6/4/09       107       .            .
3              7/1/09       124      .            96

4              9/1/09       104       1          110
4              9/4/09       155       .            .
4             10/1/09       .         .              .

Into this

patient     visitdate    sbp       dm          glu
1              1/1/09       140      1             202
2              4/1/09       160      1            341
3              6/1/09       119       .            96
3              9/1/09       104      1            110




Thanks in advance.

Mike
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