Table 1 and the Characteristics of Study Population

By Klodian Dhana

In research, especially in medical research, we describe characteristics of our study populations through Table 1. The Table 1 contain information about the mean for continue/scale variable, and proportion for categorical variable. For example: we say that the mean of systolic blood pressure in our study population is 145 mmHg, or 30% of participants are smokers. Since is called Table 1, means that is the first table in the manuscript.

To create the Table 1 sometimes it can be very time consuming. Imagine if we have 10 variables (e.g. age, gender.. etc) for 3 groups, and for each variable we compute mean (standard deviation) and number of participants (proportion); in the end we have to fill 60 numbers in the table. Moreover, we usually export the table from R to Microsoft Word, and we can be prone to making mistakes if we’re copy/pasting. Therefore, I did a search to find a simple and comprehensive way to make Table 1 with R. I found two very interesting packages named “Tableone” and “ReporteRs”. The TableOne package is created by Kazuki Yoshida and Justin Bohn and is used to create the Table 1 in R. The ReporteRs package is created by David Gohel and in this post I use for exporting Table from R to Microsoft Word.

Create Table 1

I simulated a dataset by using functions rnorm() and sample(). You can download this simulated data set on you desktop to replicate this post. To learn how to upload your dataset into R read this post.

dt

   Age Gender Cholesterol SystolicBP  BMI Smoking Education

1 67.9 Female       236.4      129.8 26.4     Yes      High

2 54.8 Female       256.3     ...read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com