AHS2
> Baseline

Baseline

Overview

Adventist Health Study-2: Connecting Lifestyle to Disease and Longevity (PDF)\\

The baseline questionnaire is a 52-page survey filled out by all participants and contains questions regarding demographics, diet, health history, and lifestyle. There are 3 versions, primarily encompassing minor changes to the dietary portions of the questionnaire. The surveys were returned from 2002 through 2008, resulting in a final subject count of approximately 96,000.
\\ \\
The questionnaire contains both optical-mark-recognition (OMR) bubble answers, and write-in answers.

Table of Contents by Section

Data

Nearly all the data obtained from subject questionnaires is available to researchers upon approval. A small amount of personally identifiable information is restricted for use. Additionally, write-in variables are transcribed on an as-needed basis, and so hitherto unused write-in variables may require transcription prior to being available for use.

Two types of data are available from the baseline questionnaire: subject responses and nutrient consumption.

Subject Responses

Subject response data consists of the actual values taken from the questionnaires. Also included are a small number of non-nutrient variables are derived from this data, such as BMI, collective screening variables, etc. These are divided into several main categories:
* Baseline Release Data
* Dietary

* Health History

* Female Health History

* Lifestyle

* Demographics

* All other non-baseline release data tables are available here: Release Data
.

An annotated copy of the baseline questionnaire is available where the variables names of each question, and the corresponding values of responses are marked. It can be obtained thru this link: Annotated Baseline Questionnaire.

Nutrient Consumption

The baseline questionnaire includes questions about the consumption frequency and serving size of over 300 foods and dietary supplements. Details are available here
.

Variable Conventions

Historic versions of SAS imposed an 8-character limit on variable names; this limitation motivated single-character variable suffixes to denote related quantities.