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Atlas criteria for age

It seems that we have two ways to define age restrictions in Atlas, which is a little bit confusing.

  1. In the initial event, you can add age as initial criteria attribute
  2. In the initial event restriction, you can add age as demographic criteria.

Is there any difference between these two?

tagging @Chris_Knoll and hoping that one day somebody will gather all his comprehensive answers in one place (which probably will be more than enough for a decent Atlas documentation) :slight_smile:

Actually, this is true for other “domain-specific attributes” as well, such as Gender or Visit. We should tell the users explicitly that these things are interchangeable, or remove them. Or, if not, point out the difference.

Logically, it operates the same to look for the age directly in the criteria for a condition (for example) or if you just look for the condition, and define an inclusion rule that the demographic attribute is the age.

however, what if you wanted to have some sort of logic like:

Has diabetes 
and (
  Gender is Female, Age > 35
  OR
  Gender is Male, Age > 40
)

the way to do it without demographics would be:

Has diabetes at age > 35 and is female
OR
Has diabetes at age > 40 and is male

the point of being able to separate demographic criteria into a standalone statement is to be able to support these sort of AND/OR operations where you just want to reference the age/gender/etc of the person at the time of the event.

-Chris

t