Wesleyan Data Management and Visualization course

[dwdanalysis]

Week 2 Task: Exploratory Analysis

Read the prior entry of this blog here: http://dwdanalysis.tumblr.com/post/129415966684/week-1-task-research-question

For this week’s assignment, I ran the following code in SAS:

LIBNAME mydata "/courses/d1406ae5ba27fe300 " access=readonly; DATA new; set mydata.nesarc_pds; LABEL S2DQ1="Alcoholic Father?"             S2DQ2="Alcoholic Mother?"             S2DQ3C2="Alcoholic Brothers?"             S2DQ3C1="Number of alcoholic brothers"             S2DQ4C2="Alcoholic Sisters?"             S2DQ4C1="Number of alcoholic sisters"             S2DQ5C2="Alcoholic sons?"             S2DQ5C1="Number of alcoholic sons"             S2DQ6C2="Alcoholic daughters?"             S2DQ6C1="Number of alcoholic daughters"             S12Q2A1="Gamble to get out of bad mood?"             S12Q2C1="Ever gambled to get out of problems?"             S12Q2A3="More than once tried to unsuccessfully quit gambling?"             S12Q2A4="Had to increase money to keep gambling exciting?"             S12Q2A8="Job or school problems because of gambling?"             S12Q2A8A="Broke up with someone because of gambling?"             S12Q2A9="Kept family or friends from knowing of gambling behavior?"             S12Q2A10="Financial trouble?"             S12Q3D="Age at onset of pathological gambling"             S12Q3I="Age at full remission of pathological gambling"             S12Q6A="Went to gamblers anonymous?"             S12Q7A="Ever went to specialist for help?"; PROC SORT; by IDNUM; PROC FREQ; TABLES S2DQ1 S2DQ2 S12Q2A3;

RUN;

The last line of code produces the following output:

The codebook for my NESARC data project can be found here: http://dwdanalysis.tumblr.com/post/129495409449/my-codebook

For my research project, I have produced and analyzed more variables (the ones that have been re-labeled in the SAS code), but for the purposes of this week’s assignment, I will only analyze the prior three.

The first and second tables show the frequencies for the amount of subjects who have an alcoholic father and mother, respectively. Out of a total sample of 43093 subjects, almost a fifth stated that they had an alcoholic father, while only 5.36% stated to have an alcoholic mother. Responses for 5.86% and 2.85% of the sample were unknown, respectively. There were no missing data for these variables.

The last table shows the amount of subjects who tried unsuccessfully to quit gambling. There were 31940 missing observations for this variable, which means that these subjects never tried to unsuccessfully quit gambling, or it was unknown. It is not clear yet what is the difference between this category, and the one coded as 9 (”unknown”), which has 19 subjects. Only 2.92% (n=326) answered yes. It is also not clear yet if the 10808 subjects who answered no did so because they didn’t suffer from pathological gambling, or because they suffered from it but hadn’t tried quitting, or they tried quitting but couldn’t do it. 

Part of the exploratory analysis of any project consists of getting closer to answering the main research question by looking at the data one variable at a time. This process often generates more questions than answers, and more exploratory analyses are still needed to answer these questions, but at least I think I’m on the right track.

[dwdanalysis]

My codebook

Section 2D: Family history of alcoholism.

S2DQ1="Alcoholic Father?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ2="Alcoholic Mother?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ3C2="Alcoholic Brothers?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ3C1="Number of alcoholic brothers" (0-11=full brothers, 99=unknown)

S2DQ4C2="Alcoholic Sisters?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ4C1="Number of alcoholic sisters" (0-11=full sisters, 99=unknown)

S2DQ5C2="Alcoholic sons?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ5C1="Number of alcoholic sons" (0-11=natural sons, 99=unknown)

S2DQ6C2="Alcoholic daughters?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown)

S2DQ6C1="Number of alcoholic daughters" (0-11=natural daughters, 99=unknown)

Section 12: Pathological gambling. S12Q2A1="Gamble to get out of bad mood?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2C1="Ever gambled to get out of problems?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A3="More than once tried to unsuccessfully quit gambling?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A4="Had to increase money to keep gambling exciting?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A8="Job or school problems because of gambling?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A8A="Broke up with someone because of gambling?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A9="Kept family or friends from knowing of gambling behavior?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q2A10="Financial trouble?" (1 = yes, 2 = no, 9 = unknown, BL=NA, never or unknown if ever gambled 5+ times in any one year)

S12Q3D="Age at onset of pathological gambling" (5-98=Age, 99=unknown, BL. NA, did not meet symptom and/or duration criteria for lifetime pathological gambling)

S12Q3I="Age at full remission of pathological gambling" (5-98=Age, 99=unknown, BL. NA, did not meet symptom and/or duration criteria for lifetime pathological gambling; had 1+ symptoms of pathological gambling in last 12 months)

S12Q6A="Went to gamblers anonymous?" (1=yes, 2=no, 9=unknown, BL. NA, did not meet symptom criteria for lifetime pathological gambling)

S12Q7A="Ever went to specialist for help?" (1=yes, 2=no, 9=unknown, BL. NA, did not meet symptom criteria for lifetime pathological gambling)

[dwdanalysis]

Week 1 Task: Research Question

To work on my project, I decided to explore the NESARC database, because I am interested in alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders.  Going through the codebook, I was particularly attracted to Section 2D: Family History of Alcoholism (page 77 of NESARC codebook), and Section 12: Pathological Gambling (betting) (page 439 of NESARC codebook).

To better understand how these two sections might be related, I performed a quick literature search in Google Scholar, using the phrase “family history of alcoholism and personal gambling”. The search provided around 34,000 results. Looking through the first page, I found two papers that caught my attention, and then used the references in these papers to find more sources (snowball effect). Several authors have reported that between a fifth and half of non-alcoholic subjects with pathological gambling have at least one first-degree relative who was alcoholic or had abused from alcohol (Linden et al., 1986; Ramires et al., 1983; Roy et al., 1984; Black et al., 2003). The explained mechanism for this possible association has to do with brain reward systems such as mesolimbic dopamine, which is present in many addictive behaviors. It has been proposed that the interaction between inherited predisposition and reinforcing properties of substance abuse may explain alcoholism and other addictions. Further, alcoholic subjects tend to have offspring who, even though they are not alcoholic themselves, may show a higher tendency to make impulsive errors and perform more poorly on decision-making measures when compared with offspring of non-alcoholic subjects (Andrews et al., 2011). Therefore, my research question and hypotheses are as follows: Research question(s): Is there an association between alcoholic first-degree relatives and personal history of pathological gambling? And if positive, does this association appears more frequently when the first-degree relative is a parent, sibling, or both?

Hypotheses: My hypothesis is that there is a strong positive association between personal history of pathological gambling and first-degree alcoholism, and that this association is more frequent when the first-degree relative is a parent.

In order to answer my research questions, I decided to work with the following variables from the NESARC codebook:

SECTION 2D: FAMILY HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM (page 77)

Variable code, Variable name (paraphrased), page

S2DQ1, Alcoholic father?, 77

S2DQ2, Alcoholic mother?, 77

S2DQ3C2, Alcoholic brothers?, 77

S2DQ3C1, Number of alcoholic brothers, 77

S2DQ4C2, Alcoholic sisters?, 78

S2DQ4C1, Number of alcoholic sisters, 78

S2DQ5C2, Alcoholic sons?, 78

S2DQ5C1, Number of alcoholic sons, 78

S2DQ6C2, Alcoholic daughters?, 79

S2DQ6C1, Number of alcoholic daughters, 78

SECTION 12: PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLING (page 439)

Variable code, Variable name (paraphrased), page

S12Q2A1, Ever gambled to get out of bad mood?, 439

S12Q2C1, Ever gambled to get out of problems?, 440

S12Q2A3, More than once tried to unsuccessfully quit gambling?, 440

S12Q2A4, Had to increase money to keep gambling exciting?, 441

S12Q2A8, Job or school problems because of gambling?, 443

S12Q2A8A, Broke up with someone because of gambling?, 443

S12Q2A9, Kept family or friends from knowing of gambling behavior?, 444

S12Q2A10, Financial trouble?, 444

S12Q3D, Age at onset of pathological gambling, 448

S12Q3I, Age at full remission of pathological gambling, 448

S12Q6A, Went to gamblers anonymous?, 454

S12Q7A, Ever went to specialist for help?, 454

My plan is to create a new variable called first-degree relative with alcoholism using the information from variables in Section 2D, and another variable of personal pathological gambling diagnosis based on the information from Section 12, and then find an association between these variables.

References

1. Linden, R. D., Pope, H. G., & Jonas, J. M. (1986). Pathological gambling and major affective disorder: preliminary findings. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

2. Ramirez, L. F., McCormick, R. A., Russo, A. M., & Taber, J. I. (1983). Patterns of substance abuse in pathological gamblers undergoing treatment. Addictive behaviors, 8(4), 425-428.

3. Roy, A., Adinoff, B., Roehrich, L., Lamparski, D., Custer, R., Lorenz, V., ... & Linnoila, M. (1988). Pathological gambling: a psychobiological study. Archives of General Psychiatry, 45(4), 369-373.

4. Black, D. W., Moyer, T., & Schlosser, S. (2003). Quality of life and family history in pathological gambling. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 191(2), 124-126.

5. Andrews, M. M., Meda, S. A., Thomas, A. D., Potenza, M. N., Krystal, J. H., Worhunsky, P., ... & Pearlson, G. D. (2011). Individuals Family History Positive for Alcoholism Show fMRI Differences in Reward Sensitivity that are Related to Impulsivity Factors. Biological psychiatry, 69(7), 675.