A statistical analysis system macro for age-standardized incidence rates.

The Statistical Analysis System (SAS) is a commercial software system for data analysis. We designed a SAS macro that produces age-specific rates of any given disease directly from the basic patient data on SAS files. The macro conforms to the statistical methods of the World Health Organization's MONICA project, which is a multinational project for MONItoring of trends and determinants in CArdiovascular disease. The data of the Coronary Register of the City of Turku, Finland, was used to test this macro. The data consists of both men and women between the ages of 35 and 64 years. Acute coronary events leading to hospitalization and acute coronary death events outside hospital have been registered since 1972. For age-standardization Segi's world population was used as the standard. The weights were then calculated for five consecutive years. Individual weights related to the population size of the reporting unit and the standard population were calculated for each subject in the population using the population size of the reporting unit and the standard population. This yielded the age-standardized rates of the acute myocardial infarction and the corresponding standard deviations. The macro permits standardization of the incidence rates of any disease. It will present the required figures instantly.