Re: st: Difference in values within the same variable

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

A small extra flourish would be

bysort patid (timesince) : gen selected = timesince[1] < 183
edit if selected

where "183" or any similar value represents six months in days. That
is, if the smallest value of -timesince- is less than six months, then
that patient had two or more prescriptions in a period of six months
or less. Such patients have -selected- 1 and others have -selected- 0.

Nick

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 2:06 PM, Christopher Baum <kit.baum@bc.edu> wrote:
> <>
> Sara said
>
> I have long data with multiple prescriptions per person. I want to
> define the length of time between successive prescriptions (see data
> below, which is sorted by patid (person ID) and presc_date (date of
> prescription)), with the eventual aim of including in my analysis only
> people who received 2 or more prescription within 6 months of each other.
>
> I'm not bothered really how I do this, although I have been trying to do
> it by calculating another variable that gives the time from the previous
> prescription (within patid). I believe the equivalent command in SPSS is
> called a 'lag', but searching  for this in Stata doesn't see to have
> turned up the right stuff.
>
> --------------
> clear all
> input patid  str9  presc_date
> 4457    11aug1997
> 4457    18aug1997
> 4457    15sep1997
> 4457    29sep1997
> 4457    27oct1997
> 4457    15dec1997
> 4457    15dec1997
> 4457    16apr1998
> 4457    11may1998
> end
> g rxd = date(presc_date,"DMY")
> format rxd %td
> bysort patid (rxd): g timesince = rxd[_n] - rxd[_n - 1]
> list
> -----------------

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