Deficit Index (DI)

A set of utilities for calculating the Deficit (frailty) Index (DI) in gerontological studies. The deficit index was first proposed by Arnold Mitnitski and Kenneth Rockwood and represents a proxy measure of aging and also can be served as a sensitive predictor of survival. For more information, see (i)"Accumulation of Deficits as a Proxy Measure of Aging" by Arnold B. Mitnitski et al. (2001), The Scientific World Journal 1, ; (ii) "Frailty, fitness and late-life mortality in relation to chronological and biological age" by Arnold B Mitnitski et al. (2001), BMC Geriatrics2002 2(1), .

di: an R package to calculate Deficit Index (DI)

Installation

devtools::install_github("izhbannikov/di")

Usage

library(di)
dd <- data.frame(subj=seq(1:100), var1=rbinom(100,1,.5), var2=rbinom(100,1,.5), var3=rbinom(100,1,.5))
ddi <- di(dd, c("var1", "var2", "var3"))

References

Arnold B. Mitnitski, Alexander J. Mogilner, and Kenneth Rockwood, “Accumulation of Deficits as a Proxy Measure of Aging,” TheScientificWorldJOURNAL, vol. 1, pp. 323-336, 2001. doi:10.1100/tsw.2001.58