The CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) provides health metrics on a large and representative sample of the United States population from 1999 to 2012, including:

• physiological and clinical parameters (e.g., serum cholesterol, glucose)
• personal environmental biomarkers (e.g., blood mercury and infectious agents)
• physiological characteristics (e.g., head circumference)
• self-reported behaviors (e.g., diet, physical activity)

These valuable data collections have previously been difficult to download, query, analyze, and integrate with other datasets. Now a team at DBMI has merged these collections from 255 separate files into a single unified and universally accessible data file that encompasses 1,191 variables on 41,474 individuals.

Access to Data

The data file can be accessed through two methods:

• The i2b2/tranSMART User Interface way — a user-friendly web app called the Dataset Explorer
• The PIC-SURE RESTful API way — an application programming interface enabling consumption by external tools such as R or Python

Also See

• Patel CJ, Pho N, McDuffie M, et al. A database of human exposomes and phenomes from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Scientific Data. 2016;3:160096. doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.96.
• Big-Data Tools Released at BD2K All-Hands Meeting
• Video: Overview of the NHANES Unified Dataset