standardize: Obtain age-standardized health impacts

In healthiar: Quantifying and Monetizing Health Impacts Attributable to Exposure

Obtain age-standardized health impacts

Description

This function obtains age-standardized health impacts based on multiple age-group specific assessments

Usage

standardize(output_attribute, age_group, ref_prop_pop = NULL)

Arguments

output_attribute	List containing the outputs of the healthiar::attribute_health() assessments for each age group (each list element should be an age group-specific assessment).
age_group	String vector with the age groups included in the age standardization. The vector refers to age-dependent data in this function and to output_attribute (if provided).
ref_prop_pop	Numeric vector specifying with the reference proportion of population for each age group. If this argument is empty, the proportion of population by age group in the provided data will be used.

Details

Methodology

This function applies the direct method of standardization, where the age-specific rates observed in a study population are applied to a standard (reference) population distribution.

For age standardization in health impact assessments, the World Health Organization \insertCiteAhmad2001_reporthealthiar and the Global Burden of Disease study \insertCiteGBD2020_tldemohealthiar provide the relevant information on this topic.

Detailed information about the methodology (including equations) is available in the package vignette. More specifically, see chapters:

• Standardization

This function works after running attribute_health() or attribute_lifetable() functions. If you want to use it in combination with compare(), please standardize first the results of attribute functions and then compare.

Value

This function returns a list containing:

1) health_main (tibble) containing the age-standardized main results;

2) health_detailed (tibble) containing the results per age group.

Author(s)

Alberto Castro & Axel Luyten

References

\insertAllCited

See Also

• Upstream: attribute_health, attribute_lifetable

Examples

# Goal: age-standardize two age group-specific impacts
output_attribute <- attribute_health(
  rr_central = 1.063,
  rr_increment = 10,
  erf_shape = "log_linear",
  cutoff_central =  0,
  age_group = c("below_40", "above_40"),
  exp_central = c(8.1, 10.9),
  bhd_central = c(1000, 4000),
  population = c(100000, 500000)
)
results <- standardize(
  output_attribute = output_attribute,
  age_group = c("below_40", "above_40"),
  ref_prop_pop = c(0.5, 0.5)
)
results$health_detailed$results_raw$impact_per_100k_inhab # age group-specific impact rate
results$health_main$impact_per_100k_inhab # age-standardized impact rate

healthiar documentation built on March 12, 2026, 5:07 p.m.