Abstract
The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is a population survey implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to monitor the health of the United States whose data is publicly available in hundreds of files. This Data Descriptor describes a single unified and universally accessible data file, merging across 255 separate files and stitching data across 4 surveys, encompassing 41,474 individuals and 1,191 variables. The variables consist of phenotype and environmental exposure information on each individual, specifically (1) demographic information, physical exam results (e.g., height, body mass index), laboratory results (e.g., cholesterol, glucose, and environmental exposures), and (4) questionnaire items. Second, the data descriptor describes a dictionary to enable analysts find variables by category and human-readable description. The datasets are available on DataDryad and a hands-on analytics tutorial is available on GitHub. Through a new big data platform, BD2K Patient Centered Information Commons (http://pic-sure.org), we provide a new way to browse the dataset via a web browser (https://nhanes.hms.harvard.edu) and provide application programming interface for programmatic access.