Re: st: Re: Standardised Incidence Rate

[Clyde B Schechter <clyde.schechter@einstein.yu.edu>]

I think John Dark will need to provide more information if anybody is going to be able to help him out.

First, you don't say whether you want direct or indirect standardization of the mortality rate.  They are different procedures, using different "ingredients," and requiring different calculations.   Nor do you tell us whether you are standardizing on both age and sex, or just age (or, less commonly, just sex).

Next, your problem is solvable only if the 850  observations you have represent a complete census of lung cancer diagnoses in the West Midlands region over that 10 year period. And in any case you will need to know the size of the West Midlands population, disaggregated by age and sex, over those 10 years.

You will also need to develop or find a data set describing the (possibly hypothetical) population to which you wish to standardize your incidence rates.

Once you have all those ingredients in place, it is really just a matter of some simple calculations--coding it in Stata will be no difficulty at all.  But from what is described in your post, you are nowhere close to getting started yet.

Poisson regression will not be part of the solution, in any case.  It is useful for many purposes, but calculating standardized incidence or mortality rates is not one of them.  Perhaps you are thinking of *adjusted* rather than standardized rates?  Poisson regression would be useful for that.

Clyde Schechter
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, NY, USA





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