Data from the famous British Doctors Study of smoking conducted by Sir Richard Doll, Austin Bradford Hill, and colleagues. The study investigated the relationship between smoking and mortality among British doctors and became one of the landmark studies in the history of epidemiology.
Format
doctors
A tibble containing aggregated mortality data from the British Doctors Study:
- age
Age group: 1 = 35 to 44 years, 2 = 45 to 54 years, 3 = 55 to 64 years, 4 = 65 to 74 years, 5 = 75 to 84 years
- agesq
Age group squared
- smoking
Smoking status: smoker or non-smoker
- deaths
Number of deaths
- personyears
Person-years of observation at the time of the analysis
Source
Breslow, N. E. and N. E. Day (1987). Statistical Methods in Cancer Research, Volume 2: The Design and Analysis of Cohort Studies. Lyon: International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Details
The British Doctors Study was initiated in 1951 by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill to investigate the relationship between smoking and mortality. Questionnaires concerning smoking habits were sent to British doctors, who were subsequently followed over many years.
The study provided important prospective evidence concerning the association between cigarette smoking and mortality, particularly from lung cancer. Its findings played a major role in the development of modern epidemiology and in the scientific debate over the causal effects of smoking.
The data in this dataset are aggregated by age group and smoking
status. The personyears variable records the amount of observation
contributed by each group and can be used as an exposure term in
analyses of mortality rates, such as Poisson regression.
References
Doll, R. and Hill, A. B. (1954). The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits: A preliminary report. British Medical Journal, 1(4877), 1451-1455.
Breslow, N. E. and Day, N. E. (1987). Statistical Methods in Cancer Research, Volume 2: The Design and Analysis of Cohort Studies. Lyon: International Agency for Research on Cancer.