In the information age, there is more data out there than can be analyzed in a lifetime!  As a faculty member, I have been often asked about readily available and wanted to compile a list of readily available data.  I am sure, many of you have encountered the same question from your students.  Here is a compilation of medical data available for download.  I have personally worked with many of these and have found them very helpful.  These are mostly exclusive to the United States and would like input about international datasets which are freely accessible as well.  Navigating through some of these datasets may take some getting used to:

Name:

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey(NHANES)

Description:

The NHANES interview includes demographic, socioeconomic, dietary, and health-related questions. The examination component consists of medical, dental, and physiological measurements, as well as laboratory tests administered by highly trained medical personnel.

URL

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes.htm

Description:

The following link is a link that will bring you to many sets of data outlined below.  These are very helpful.  Some are self-reported data (NHANES), while others are performed by health care professionals (i.e NAMCS data).  There is some longitudinal data, and others have longitudinal data if you incorporate the mortality linkage files.  These are excellent for Cox-proportional models.

URL:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/ftp_data.htm

For other datasets available from the national center for health statistics (NCHS) please see below:

This page allows you to search the CDC and NCHS sites. NCHS is the Federal Government's principal vital and health statistics agency. NCHS data systems include data on vital events as well as information on health status, lifestyle and exposure to unhealthy influences, the onset and diagnosis of illness and disability, and the use of health care. Some of the NCHS data systems and surveys are ongoing annual systems while others are conducted periodically. NCHS has two major types of data systems: systems based on populations, containing data collected through personal interviews or examinations; and systems based on records, containing data collected from vital and medical records. Data include: National Health Interview Survey, National Immunization Survey, National Survey of Family Growth, National Health Care Survey , National Employer Health Insurance Survey, National Vital Statistics System, and Mortality Data. Research activities include: Aging, AIDS, Classification of Diseases, Data on America's Children, Evaluation of Certificates, Healthy People 2000, International Activities, Minority Health, National Death Index, Nutrition Monitoring, and Public Health Conference on Records and Statistics. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NCHS is located in Hyattsville, Maryland, with offices in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and with a CDC-liaison office in Atlanta, Georgia.

Name:

BRFSS

Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System

Description:

The name explains what the scope of this database.  There is wonderful data physical activity, cardiovascular disease, chronic pulmonary diseases, and other self-reported data.  More than 500,000 interviews were conducted in 2011, making the BRFSS the largest telephone survey in the world. Also in 2011, new weighting methodology—raking, or iterative proportional fitting—replaced the post stratification weighting method that had been used with previous BRFSS data sets.

URL:

http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/

Name:

Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute

This database works to provide information on cancer statistics in an effort to reduce the burden of cancer among the U.S. population.  This is an excellent resource to study risk factors of cancer and longitudinal mortality studies.

http://seer.cancer.gov/