R help - Oct 2008 - NA's in multiple choice summary table in Hmisc

Hi,

I have a set of 30 binary variables measuring side effects after drug 
treatment. Since each subject can have multiple side effects, I want to 
display these side effects in a multiple choice table. I'm using the summary
and mChoice functions of the Hmisc package, because it produces nicely 
formatted latex tables. My problem is, that table includes a category for 
people who have at least one absent symptom and I don't know how to exclude 
it.

Here's a very easy reproducible example:

library(Hmisc)
Symptom1<-c("Headache","Headache",NA)
Symptom2<-c(NA,"Anxiety",NA)
Symptoms<-mChoice(Symptom1,Symptom2)
summary(~Symptoms,method="reverse")
Descriptive Statistics  (N=3)

+-------------------+-------+
|                   |       |
+-------------------+-------+
|Symptom1 : Headache|67% (2)|
+-------------------+-------+
|    NA             |67% (2)|
+-------------------+-------+
|    Anxiety        |33% (1)|
+-------------------+-------+

Now, I want to either completely exclude the NA category or - if included - 
it should count the number of people who have NA's in all symptoms rather 
than in a single symptom. In the example above, the NA's should be 1 instead
of 2 cases.
I tried to specify na.include=FALSE but it does not work.

Any help is highly appreciated.

Erich

Erich Studerus, Psychiatrische Uni-Klinik wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a set of 30 binary variables measuring side effects after drug 
> treatment. Since each subject can have multiple side effects, I want to 
> display these side effects in a multiple choice table. I'm using the 
> summary and mChoice functions of the Hmisc package, because it produces 
> nicely formatted latex tables. My problem is, that table includes a 
> category for people who have at least one absent symptom and I don't 
> know how to exclude it.
> 
> Here's a very easy reproducible example:
> 
> library(Hmisc)
> Symptom1<-c("Headache","Headache",NA)
> Symptom2<-c(NA,"Anxiety",NA)
> Symptoms<-mChoice(Symptom1,Symptom2)
> summary(~Symptoms,method="reverse")
> Descriptive Statistics  (N=3)
> 
> +-------------------+-------+
> |                   |       |
> +-------------------+-------+
> |Symptom1 : Headache|67% (2)|
> +-------------------+-------+
> |    NA             |67% (2)|
> +-------------------+-------+
> |    Anxiety        |33% (1)|
> +-------------------+-------+
> 
> Now, I want to either completely exclude the NA category or - if 
> included - it should count the number of people who have NA's in all 
> symptoms rather than in a single symptom. In the example above, the
NA's
> should be 1 instead of 2 cases.
> I tried to specify na.include=FALSE but it does not work.
> 
> Any help is highly appreciated.
> 
> Erich
Instead of NA put '' or "" and it should work.
Frank


-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University