Protobi NHANES explorer

Protobi provides an interactive, online view of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

NHANES is an ongoing program by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) that tracks the health, diet, and lifestyle of U.S. residents, from children to adults. It combines physical exams, lab tests, and in-depth dietary interviews to capture a comprehensive picture of the population’s nutritional status, eating habits, and overall health. The data used to informs public health decisions and healthcare policy.

NHANES data spans many datasets, collected over 23 years by the CDC. The datasets span across various topics like lab, dietary, demographics and examination.

NHANES modules

The Protobi NHANES explorer is organized by module to parallel the NHANES data:

  • Demographics – Key data about the age, gender, race, and other characteristics of participants.
  • Questionnaire – Results from survey instruments completed by partipants.
  • Laboratory – Results from laboratory tests.
  • Dietary – Detailed information about what participants eat, drink, and take as supplements.
  • Examination Data – Results from physical exams that measure participants' health status.

The left panel contains variables frequently used to filter or crosstab the data for ready reference.

Within each module each survey appears as a tab. Within the tab, every question in the survey appears as an interactive chart or "element".

For each element the bold title e.g. DBD100 represents the table name or data column name in NHANES. The titles show the brief text provided by NHANES; the longer more complete text that interviewers/respondents would have seen in the instrument can also be displayed. Target populations are shown in the footnote.

Query and compare

Each module is interactive, allowing users to explore trends, query the data and create charts and graphs. You can subset respondents by clicking values to define filters. Filtering anywhere filters all the elements everywhere.

  • Click to select a value within an element ("is")
  • Alt+click to select more than one value within an element ("or")
  • Shift+Click to exclude a value ("not")

Users can generate comparisons across various factors such as:

  • Years: Track how health trends have evolved over time, identifying emerging patterns or areas of concern.
  • Gender and Age: Dive into gender or age-specific trends, uncovering health disparities or differences in dietary habits.
  • Ethnicity, Education, and Income: Understand how socioeconomic factors influence health, nutrition, and access to healthcare.

You can press on values to drill into records that fit into the constraing. For instance, press 2021-2023 in SDDSRVYR to see records from that time period only.

You can cross any variable like DBD100 by any other variable (Gender, Age, etc.) to create custom tables.

There are pre-defined chart views that you can browse, but you can also customize the analysis to compare data across multiple variables such as age, gender, income, and ethnicity.

Users can ask (and answer) their own questions and build their own analysis. For example, you could track how dietary patterns have changed over the years or look at how health outcomes differ based on education level.

In the example below, we see BMXBMI by different education levels. We created this view by adding education (DMDEDUC2) as the crosstab banner.

Relational database

Protobi maintains the NHANES data in an SQL relational database that can be queried directly via any SQL client or other leading data vis tools.

For each survey, data tables for each available year are stacked vertically into views that allow trend analysis across years.

A master view joins these horizontally across tables by seqn to allow queries between surveys and modules. For advanced analysis, it is possible to create additional views and tables that transform the data appropriately via custom SQL.

Explore for yourself

We can provide access and support pro bono (within reason) to both the Protobi viewer and the integrated database, for qualified public health and acaedemic researchers seeking to make use of NHANES data. If interested, please contact us at https://protobi.com/contact .